Colour #1: Homer's Weirdness

Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass, is a very interesting book. Simply put, the question it explores is this (controversial) one:

“Do different languages lend their speakers to different perspectives? Is our particular language a lens through which we view the world?”

In other words, is language a neutral medium? Or does language influence the way we see/think of the world?

 

Common sense would suggest that:

“Each culture is free to bestow labels onto concepts as it pleases, but the concepts behind these labels have been formed by the dictates of nature.”

No language, surely, would have a term that includes both birds and stones, since they are so obviously unrelated and non-overlapping physical concepts. No child, learning a language, ever asks, “How do I know if this is a cat or a dog?” Distinct terms for obviously distinct physical things in the real world.

 

Except… that isn’t entirely true. Take the arm and the hand. Or the hand and the finger. Some languages use different words for each, others the same word!

 

The area the book uses as its primary exhibit for exploring the question in the first para is… colour. Or what the author colourfully (pun intended) calls the “fighting over the rainbow”. And that makes for a long, fascinating tale that extends far beyond language into other domains like optics and applications! Let’s get started.

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The tale starts with William Gladstone, a future PM of Britain. But this was much before that, when Gladstone was still sitting in the opposition benches. With time on his hands (and his interest and intelligence), he wrote a monstrous 1,700 page tome on Homer (of Iliad and Odyssey fame). There were many new insights, an equal number of controversial views, and it was too big for most to read (so the majority just spoke of it based on what others said/wrote about it).

 

The famous immortal phrase from that book is “wine-dark sea” – Homer used such (or equivalent) phrases, not once but often, to describe the sea. This is very weird – the sea’s colour is nothing like wine, is it? Many dismissed the question saying it was just poetic license at work. But Gladstone, in fact, had considered and dismissed the possibility in his book: poetic license is used occasionally, not repeatedly (Gladstone dedicated 30 pages to examples of such usage across multiple objects for which the colour name used by Homer made absolutely no sense, cutting across what we call blue, brown, green and violet!). Gladstone rightly pointed out that using wrong colour names so abundantly is not poetic license, because the “result is not license but confusion” (Honey is termed green!)

 

Note: We are not talking of differences in shades here. Homer uses the same colour name for the sea and oxen (apart from the wine). How can they all be the same colour, asked Gladstone.

 

Gladstone’s also observed that Homer uses incompatible colour names to describe the same thing. Violet here, grey there! Black and white dominate the Homerian landscape, outnumbering all the other colours. And there is no word for blue anywhere. Green is hardly used. What was going on?

 

One explanation offered was that Homer was blind! But Gladstone dismissed this by pointing how vividly Homer describes everything… except colour. Perhaps Homer’s vision was defective? But then, asked Gladstone, wouldn’t his choice of colours have been grating to the reader and listener from time immemorial?

 

How could all this be explained? Without using the term (it was not yet known):

“What Gladstone was proposing was nothing less than universal colour blindness among the ancient Greeks.”

 

We will continue this tale of colours in subsequent blogs in the series.