Was Homer (color)blind?
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This makes me think of the time before we had color photography and cinematography. Somehow, we could transpose all of those shades of black and white into a full spectrum of color, and some people still prefer their photographs and films that way. (I say this as a French hornist who was constantly having to transpose from one key to anothe.)
Selected readings
- "Color vocabulary and pre-attentive color perception" (2/23/09) — P. Kay
- "It's not easy seeing green" (3/2/15)
- "Grue and bleen: the blue-green distinction and its implications" (10/4/19)
- "The colors of the seas and the directions" (4/28/21)
- "Synesthesia and Chinese characters" (39/17)
[Thanks to John Rohsenow]
hidroklorik asit said,
May 3, 2026 @ 3:32 pm
That’s a really evocative way to put it. Black-and-white images didn’t actually lack richness—they just required the viewer to participate, to mentally “color in” the world. In a similar way, strategic ambiguity lets different actors project their own meanings onto the same space, each “seeing” something slightly different depending on their position.
Julia said,
May 3, 2026 @ 4:13 pm
St John's also started The Catherine Project, whichI can attest is a wonderful and free way to discuss great literature in a small group zoom setting, and in some places in person as well
Main Page – Catherine Project https://share.google/o1DublY29LOfB0OAr
Victor Mair said,
May 3, 2026 @ 6:28 pm
About 20-30 years ago, I gave a series of lectures at St. John's in Santa Fe. I was thoroughly impressed by the quality of the students, faculty, and open-minded teaching methods.
Jonathan Smith said,
May 3, 2026 @ 6:13 pm
I'm not very sure about this conventional wisdom about color term development… or maybe it applies only in particular contexts. Re: e.g. Ancient Greek, it is somehow odd to go through χλωρός/κύανος/αἴθων (for any of which very much cf. e.g. early Chinese) and conclude that "Ancient Greek hadn't yet developed color terms aside from black, white, and red" no?
Unless the word "term" is doing a lot of work here. My guess is that what is really going on over time is that dyes/fabrics/manufacturing usher in a world in which the same object can be interchangeably found in many/any shades. Thus what I sometimes call "color-wheel colors" / "crayon colors" in Chinese class — still distinguished in ways both clear and subtle from older "nature" colors in modern language syntax. Perhaps only such are "color terms" on the video's framing?
(Main) point is clearly there was very much no shortage of interesting ways to talk about color in "ancient" languages… more and more interesting than modern ways, all things considered. The notion that e.g. "sky and water are blue" is super modern and kinda dull.
Chris Button said,
May 3, 2026 @ 9:21 pm
Doesn't the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European lexicon show that colors were more about attributes (e.g, dark, shiny, lush, etc.) than specific hues?
Chris Button said,
May 3, 2026 @ 9:35 pm
A good case can be made that color film ruined cinematography by depriving us of all that wonderful chiaroscuro that typified "film noir".
Peter Cyrus said,
May 4, 2026 @ 4:11 am
When we say that old films or young languages are in black and white, what we really mean is that the first term in a description of an image or "pixel" indicates how much total light is perceived, which is completely reasonable. Subsequent terms indicate the frequencies: the ratios of red light to green light, and of blue light to the red/green light. So the famous progression black/white + red + yellow/green + blue makes perfect sense from a physiological point of view: it's just refining the description by adding more optic nerves. Maybe the subsequent progression will add descriptive terms for texture, fidelity of reflection, movement, borders, or something else.
One can of course talk about why our optical systems evolved to be as they are – maybe seeing blue isn't as adaptive as red/green – but that evolution predates Homer and probably all language.
Lucas Christopoulos said,
May 4, 2026 @ 6:08 am
πορφύρα (porphúra) originally referred to the Tyrian purple dye, the most prized color of antiquity. While violet appears at the end of a rainbow as the final spectral color, purple is a human-perceived mix of red and blue that lies outside the rainbow’s spectral continuum.
For purple (pourpre) and violet, French does distinguish the two, but in everyday language, the line is blurred. “Violet” is broad; “pourpre” is specific and prestigious.
David Marjanović said,
May 4, 2026 @ 7:13 am
Ah, we believed we could, but we were really just making things up with varying amounts of success. AFAIK, blood in black-and-white movies is chocolate sauce – it's brown, but nonetheless looks more convincing than red theater blood.
I don't think many attributes have been reconstructed, but, just within Germanic, brown used to mean "dark and shiny" and was not a color term until some 400 years ago.
No. The reason we have so many fewer blue-sensitive cones than "red-" (actually yellow-) or green-sensitive cones, if that's what you mean, is that this is a crude way of correcting for the chromatic aberration of our lenses. However, having blue-sensitive ones (originally ultraviolet-sensitive ones) goes back all the way to the origin of vertebrates or so. Placental mammals have lost the original red and the original green; Old World monkeys, including ourselves, then duplicated the gene for yellow-sensitive opsin, and one of the duplicates mutated enough to shift its absorption maximum into the green area.
kostik said,
May 4, 2026 @ 7:18 am
I think the real issue here is how we define a “color term.” Ancient languages were definitely not lacking in ways to describe color; if anything, they were more sensitive to nature, light, and context. The problem might be that we try to map these expressions onto modern, standardized color categories.
Today, it feels natural to think of something like “blue” as a single category, but that’s actually the result of cultural and technological developments. As dyes, textiles, and production methods expanded, colors became more standardized. Ancient languages, on the other hand, may have had fewer abstract color categories but richer, more situational and descriptive expressions.
So instead of saying they “lacked color terms,” it might be more accurate to say they conceptualized color differently.
Coby said,
May 4, 2026 @ 11:14 am
My native language is Polish, though I haven't spoken it in a long time. But as far as I remember, it has no single color term like "blue" that embraces both light blue (niebieski) and dark blue (granatowy).
Philip Taylor said,
May 4, 2026 @ 12:49 pm
To which ChatGPT adds :
KeithB said,
May 4, 2026 @ 2:07 pm
"AFAIK, blood in black-and-white movies is chocolate sauce – it's brown,"
I don't know if it is used in most movies, but it was famously used in the shower scene in Psycho.
David Marjanović said,
May 4, 2026 @ 5:05 pm
Oh yeah – in my kinds of German, türkis (final stress) has become as basic as purple, pink or orange; it's not part of blue there.
John Swindle said,
May 4, 2026 @ 7:32 pm
None of the Polish words for blue provided by Coby or Philip Taylor remind me at all of the most common Russian words for shades of blue, which I take to be “siniy” and “goluboy.”
Jarek Weckwerth said,
May 5, 2026 @ 4:58 am
Well, at least to this native speaker, niebieski is very decidedly the hyperonym. Granatowy is a subtype of niebieski. In other words, no one will complain if you describe a dark blue as simply blue.
You can try Polish Wikipedia for "Barwa granatowa" or the Great Dictionary of Polish at wsjp.pl. (The Wiki page is very disappointing but true in defining the colour as a type of blue.)
The other terms are just equivalent to the English ones — not basic.
David's claim about turquoise is actually more interesting; I would go as far as to claim that it is actually less of a prototypical blue than navy blue/granatowy. I'll test it when I'm in Vienna in the summer ;)
ajay said,
May 5, 2026 @ 7:49 am
This makes me think of the time before we had color photography and cinematography. Somehow, we could transpose all of those shades of black and white into a full spectrum of color,
This is a really interesting claim because it is definitely not a description of what I do when watching a black and white film, or at least not consciously. I'm not sitting there thinking to myself "well, Ingrid Bergman's coat in this scene is grey on the screen but I think it would be pale blue, and that car in the background is racing green, and Bogie's wearing a tie with a dark red stripe".
That's just information outside the experience that I don't consciously think about, any more than I listen to a radio play and consciously try to work out what everyone's wearing and what the room they're in looks like. Or indeed what the rest of the setting of a painting looks like (what's hanging on the back wall of the room where the Mona Lisa is sitting? What do her shoes look like?)
Victor Mair said,
May 5, 2026 @ 9:23 am
"The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red" from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act 2, Scene 2).
Discussed recently on LL:
"Translating Shakespeare" (4/23/26)
See especially the comments.
David Marjanović said,
May 5, 2026 @ 9:36 am
Note: Berlin does not work for this. Here in Berlin I was told to ask the guy in the blue shirt, and it turned out to be turquoise…
Same here. However…
…I think there are people who do that. I've met someone who claims to imagine what people live in a house and what their lives are like just from passing by that house.
stephen said,
May 5, 2026 @ 9:55 am
Sirius in ancient times was consistently described as red. The Star has a white dwarf companion which might have been still a red giant 2000 years ago, but there are other possible explanations.
They might have been seeing the star near the horizon, so the atmosphere might have make it look redder.
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/310/2/355/1047131?login=false
John Swindle said,
May 5, 2026 @ 2:21 pm
Long ago, as a soldier in a foreign war zone, I sat in a clubhouse and watched a Star Trek episode on TV. I'd seen it before. Captain Kirk and Spock looked as I remembered, but the alien monsters looked entirely different. The plot and the dialogue were the same, but the blocking was different. Had this piece of crap been remade? No. The previous time I'd "watched" it had been on somebody's radio with a TV band. I'd only heard the audio. I hadn't realized I was imagining the visuals, but when they were different I noticed. I don't have the faintest idea what colors were there–I think the TV in the club was monochrome–but I can easily imagine someone unconsciously assigning colors.
ajay said,
May 6, 2026 @ 4:08 am
I've met someone who claims to imagine what people live in a house and what their lives are like just from passing by that house.
I do that, and I would have thought that to some extent almost everyone does this – just as part of normal human curiosity. You look in through the window and you see a sparsely furnished room with an old sofa and a big Bob Marley poster on the wall, you think "student house, probably stoners". You see a woman in a business suit running down the street pushing a baby in a pushchair while talking on her mobile phone and you think "poor woman, maybe her babysitter hasn't turned up or maybe the kid's ill?"
But the difference is that there actually are people living in those houses with lives that we can guess about. There is no correct answer to the question of what sort of jacket Cabin Pressure's Martin Crieff is wearing when he's driving to Ottery St Mary – he's a fictional radio character being acted by Benedict Cumberbatch.
I pick this example because the show's writer thinks along very similar lines: https://johnfinnemore.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-hairline-of-captain-martin-crieff.html
"My rule has always been: if something is mentioned in a broadcast episode of Cabin Pressure, then it's a fact (well, actually, a fiction, but you know what I mean), like it or not. For instance, Martin is short. I know a lot of people wish he wasn't, but he is; it's been mentioned several times in various episodes, and no amount of pointing out that the actor who plays him happens to be tall is going to change that. Sorry.
However, anything NOT mentioned in a broadcast episode – anything in a script that then gets cut, or a recording that then gets edited, or, I don't know, mentioned as a personal theory in an informal Q and A in a pub, is up for grabs. For instance, how many children does Douglas have? I have my theory, others may have theirs – until I put my version into a script, they're equally valid.
You may be able to see where I'm going with this.
As far as I remember, Martin's hair has never been mentioned on air. Carolyn is described as white-haired, Douglas may or may not be 'tinting'; but the locks of the supreme commander remain a mystery. Is he ginger? Is he perhaps thinning a little on top? Does he have a massive afro? Nobody knows. Until someone talks about it in an episode, it's a mystery: an uncollapsed waveform, simultaneously luxuriant and ginger; brown and sparse; and for that matter pink and dreadlocked. Schroedinger's hairline.
Now, personally…. as I believe I may have casually mentioned last night… when I picture Martin, I imagine him with a 'sun-roof' style bald spot on the crown of his head, which he's rather sensitive about. But until and unless I choose to mention that in a broadcast episode, that's just my theory- no more or less valid than anyone else's…"
Tom said,
May 6, 2026 @ 10:47 am
See the discussion at https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/zy7ls/my_all_time_favorite_calvin_and_hobbes_color/
Philip Taylor said,
May 6, 2026 @ 3:31 pm
Ajay — « You look in through the window and you see a sparsely furnished room with an old sofa and a big Bob Marley poster on the wall, you think "student house, probably stoners". You see a woman in a business suit running down the street pushing a baby in a pushchair while talking on her mobile phone and you think "poor woman, maybe her babysitter hasn't turned up or maybe the kid's ill?" » — perhaps you do. I don't. It would be interesting to know what fraction of Language Log readers / commenters do as you do, and what fraction don't.
Victor Mair said,
May 7, 2026 @ 7:54 am
Behold this once colorfully decorated medieval wooden frieze from Samarkand on the Silk Road, now reduced to charred black, yet still much can be discerned from the remains.
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWqMne0DRIB/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmEUWhwQ7Lg
And be sure to watch this video through to the end to see how colorful the wall paintings of the Afrasiab palace actually were:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x9ddugMilo&t=154s
with a fairly lengthy Sogdian inscription translated into English (2:32).
[h.t. Judith Lerner, Frank Clements]
Victor Mair said,
May 8, 2026 @ 7:25 am
Legends, Tales, and Fables in the Art of Sogdiana
by Boris Marshak, with an Appendix by Vladimir A. Livshits
https://archive.org/details/legendstalesfablesintheartofsogdianaborismarshak_678_G
[thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto]