Samuel
@samuel.fm
guy who is mad at Nolan’s Odyssey because it depicts the sea as blue instead of wine-dark
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Samuel
this is popping off, it seems this hit the median bluesky user’s interests with surgical precision
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Hugh
It’s crazy that Ancient Greeks looked at the ocean and they were like “that’s wine coloured”. I guess they didn’t have as many liquids to compare it to, and it wasn’t olive oil coloured.
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Mx-Maxxing
It’s not that simple in my view. Words for colors tend to be very unstable and imprecise, cross-linguistically. In Japanese, the adjective aoi can describe colors ranging from blue to green. Instead of saying ‘blue’ or ‘black’ or ‘brown’ ancients might have said ‘dark’ in common usage.
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Mx-Maxxing
But it’s not like Ancient Greek didn’t have more precise words for colors. Kyaneos and glaukos could both describe blue hues. Glaukos could also mean gray, though.
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Mx-Maxxing
Words for specific colors tend to depend on the culture having developed a pigment in that color.
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Mx-Maxxing
In Japanese they use aoi for the color of the sky, in Classical Armenian they had an adjective tzawi for sky-blue which seems to be related to the word for sea, tzov. Some languages derive the word for sky-colored from the word for sky like Latin caeruleus < caelum or AG ouranios < ouranos
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Mx-Maxxing
Ancient Greek also had a word for the blue of the sky or sea or eyes: kharopos or kharopotēs which literally means something like ‘having a delighted appearance’ but I don’t know if it was used frequently
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bleddwgan🦑
Thanks. This is so wild because blue in Polish is "niebieski" from "niebo" (sky) but that's just regular blue and sky-blue is "błękitny" (apparently a Germanic borrowing)
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John M. Cunningham
I was actually just paging through my copy of Through the Language Glass to refresh my memory about this!
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Mx-Maxxing
The Black Sea also is blue-green under ordinary calm conditions, but most ancient names for it refer to it as black or lightless. Poetic license is a hoot.
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Simon Watkins
The word in Ancient Greek is oinops (can’t be arsed to find Greek letters font). It’s more literal translations is wine-eyed or wine-faced. Which when you think about is a fantastically rich metaphor. The whole colour thing is based on one translation that has become the commonplace.
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Nam Talmbout
This Dawn's fingers are merely sanguine and not made of roses. Send the whole movie back. Get someone serious.
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Tarquin 'Howling Mad' Holmes
"Why doesn't Greece look like a tourist brochure for beach summer holidays" - I dunno, as someone who has lived in the Eastern Mediterranean, maybe because there's actually more than one season a year?
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Samuel
archeologists now believe “wine” in Homer’s time was actually much more akin to Mountain Dew: Baja Blast
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Nam Talmbout
In 1400 and 92, Columbus sailed the ocean Dew. On three ships: The Game Fuel, The LiveWire, and The Baja Blast
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Mike Foster
I think Elon Musk is probably furious because the film has no depictions of the physical love between Greek heroes that was so widespread in the Ancient Greek world.
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James
*alan moore voice* possibly because you ave ad too much dark woine
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Miles Archer
Radiolab did a great segment on why the color blue doesn’t appear in Homer - the episode is titled Colors and the other two segments are wonderful as well. Highly recommended!
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Doc
Is this a good time to mention that wine-dark sea might have happened because it was a cloudy day?
bleddwgan🦑
I keep saying! If we want to be be faithful to it the only thing we have is the poem
Mark Paterson
Does wine-dark necessarily refer to color? Perhaps it’s about the deep oblivion of a heavy session
spaceager.bsky.social
Um akshewally... insert pedantic monologue about the how many colors have different names in different languages at different times
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