Blue: the color that didn't exist until someone invented a word for it
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Keywords
Homer; Berlin and Kay; Jules Davidoff; Himba; Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity); pigment synthesis; lapis lazuli; Russian; goluboy, siniy; time; space; emotions; William Gladstone; κύανος > κυανός > cyan
"Got the blues"?
Selected readings
- "Was Homer (color)blind?" (5/3/26)
- "Sacré bleu! — the synesthesia of Walmart cyan" (10/8/22)
- "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" (3/9/17)
- "Sapir-Whorf redux" (5/15/25)
- "Linguistic relativity: snow and horses" (4/15/25)
Coby said,
May 12, 2026 @ 8:24 am
Interesting talk, but wrong about the Hebrew Bible. Tekhelet (תכלת) is frequently mentioned. See the Wikipedia page.
anon said,
May 12, 2026 @ 9:54 am
This makes me think of Luria's Cognitive Development, in which people identify "colors" by what they represent (river mud, calf's liver, etc) instead of standard names, and also reminds me of how English uses "barn owl" and "horned owl" whereas the French have "chouette" and hiboux" (pardon my spelling!) respectively.
Jim Mack said,
May 12, 2026 @ 10:33 am
Interesting that the Russian distinction between light and dark blue has a close parallel in English between light and dark red — we treat "pink" as a separate color. And we don't see that as odd.
Kate Bunting said,
May 12, 2026 @ 11:50 am
Correction to Anon – English uses 'owl' for all species whether they have ear tufts or not. The barn owl is just one British species; the only British one that has tufts is the long-eared owl.
anon said,
May 12, 2026 @ 11:53 am
@Kate Bunting: I believe that was my point! As an American I was using the Great Horned Owl and Barn Owl as my examples, and I agree they are all called "owl"
David Marjanović said,
May 12, 2026 @ 4:30 pm
Pink isn't light red (i.e. closer to orange), it's pastel red ("mixed" with white).
For two unrelated words for parts of "red", your best bet is probably Hungarian, though there the situation is muddled with other considerations (of the two words, one is transparently related to "blood" and is more or less automatically used in poetic language, AFAIK).
Rather, what I find interesting about the "European color conspiracy" is what has escaped it. English has a few such terms – buff and tan come to mind.
Martin Schwartz said,
May 12, 2026 @ 4:47 pm
Greek kúanos (which Davidoff pronounces káyanos because of the Latinizing transcription with y = Attic ü), apparently from a Hittite
word for 'blue vitriol/copper oxide', becomes kuváne 'black'
in Tsakonian, a neo-Doric language of the Western Peloponnesian coast;
when I visited there (Tyrós) in 1963, the locals used it a phrase
for 'black snake' (kuváne úTHi, with theta in the 2nd word).
Re Russ. golubój (-boy), Davidoff, if she knows, could have told us it's
ifrom gólub 'pigeon' In the Persian of Iran, kabūd is '(dark) blue'
< *kapauta- (Skt. tar-) 'pigeon'; the cxolor-word, with suffix
*-tara- 'more (or less), -ish' then gave the word for 'pigeon',
kabūtar, kaftar. Oh, Mod. Greek has for 'blue' ble < French bleu.
Martin Schwartz
Lucas Christopoulos said,
May 12, 2026 @ 4:58 pm
The “Black Snake” of the Tsakonians (said to be descendants of the Laconian/Lacedaemonian people) still uses the word kuváne úTHi? That’s fantastic! I used to spend my summers nearby, in Argolis. The Mavro Fidi (Black Snake) is Malpolon monspessulanus. I call it the “Olive Snake” instead, as its color is more olive-like. They say it’s called “black” because of its bite—it’s mildly venomous and can leave the skin darkened.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
May 12, 2026 @ 5:15 pm
In the first minute of the video, leading up to the 46-second mark, the speaker uses either once and neither three times. To my ear, the last "neither" is pronounced differently than the previous two. Is anyone else hearing this?
JPL said,
May 12, 2026 @ 7:10 pm
[ai], [i], [i], [ai]. (either, neither, neither, neither)
"Nambia" should be "Namibia". (6:00)
Two different kinds of questions: 1) Do you see the difference between these (two) colors?
2) What color is this?
Lucas Christopoulos said,
May 12, 2026 @ 7:46 pm
Sorry, they had changed it to a full species:
Malpolon insignitus (instead of Malpolon monspessulanus insignitus earlier).
The current accepted name is Malpolon insignitus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Montpellier_snake
VMartin said,
May 12, 2026 @ 7:49 pm
The lecturer puts again Darwinian speculation into linguistics. She mentions "survival" several times in connection with naming colors. Then she presents an experiment where natives, with no word for blue, cannot properly distinguish green from blue. One wonders how bears can tell apart blueberries from green leaves? Do they have perhaps a word for blue and therefore have "survived"?
"Blueberries are among their favourites and are critical to a bear’s diet. Bears can eat up to 30 000 of these tasty morsels in a single day. For hours each day they forage to make up this 78 lbs daily quotient."
https://www.ealt.ca/blog/blueberries-bears
I add that the definition of what is color is not a simple one.
anon said,
May 12, 2026 @ 11:40 pm
I thought she was about to mention Indo-Aryan nil "blue"
Kate Bunting said,
May 13, 2026 @ 2:37 am
Apologies to Anon – I thought you were saying that all 'chouettes' were barn owls!
Martin Schwartz said,
May 13, 2026 @ 2:54 am
@Lucas Christopoulos and all:
I just spent 45 minutes writing about 'black snake'
and Tsakonian, but of course my computa somehow deleted it.
Now no energy/inclination to rewrite it. I'll try again in the next 3 days.
more concisely.
Martin Schwartz
John Swindle said,
May 13, 2026 @ 3:58 am
Unsettling presentation! Is she an AI? Does it matter?
I was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Kansas and couldn't understand why brown, the color of so much of the landscape, wasn't a primary color and couldn't even be reliably produced by combining pigments, at least with elementary school tools and skills.
Lucas Christopoulos said,
May 13, 2026 @ 4:55 am
That would be of great interest, Martin. I know the origin of the Aesculapian snake (Elaphe longissima), found on medical symbols, and Athena Pallas’s glass lizard, or Sheltopusik (Pseudopus apodus), but I have no idea why the Laconians have carried the myth of the blue snake "kuane ophis" (Malpolon insignitus) and why it became black (mavro fidi) in other parts of the Peloponese.
The ‘rhabdos’ (ῥάβδος) carried by wrestling referees in ancient Hellas, also seen in representations of Qin dynasty wrestling referees in China, later became the basis for the name of the red and green Rhabdophis tigrinus (Yamakagashi) in China, Korea, and Japan. However, that is a much later nomenclature.
Andreas Johansson said,
May 13, 2026 @ 6:38 am
David Marjanović wrote:
Pink isn't light red (i.e. closer to orange), it's pastel red ("mixed" with white).
I confess I thought that when it came to colours, "light" and "mixed with white" were synonymous.
Victor Mair said,
May 13, 2026 @ 7:06 am
@John Swindle:
Is she too perfect?
@Barbara Phillips Long:
About "either", "neither". I noticed that, and it didn't bother me. It's all too human; I do it myself.
Michael Vnuk said,
May 13, 2026 @ 7:34 am
John Swindle referred to brown. I had similar thoughts as a young schoolchild. Although a set of 12 coloured pencils would include brown, we never heard how to make it. Green was yellow and blue; purple was blue and red; orange was red and yellow. And yet I grew up in a brown country. One of Australia's most famous poems, 'My Country' by Dorothea Mackellar, includes the line: 'The wide brown land for me!'
ajay said,
May 13, 2026 @ 8:10 am
Pink isn't light red (i.e. closer to orange), it's pastel red ("mixed" with white).
This isn't the way that "light" is generally used for colours. Blue mixed with white is "light blue", and if I keep mixing white in it will eventually become pretty much white. "Light blue" doesn't mean "closer to green". The Pantone colour finder makes this pretty clear – for any given frequency of light, you can have lighter and darker versions on it. https://www.pantone.com/uk/en/color-finder
Doug said,
May 13, 2026 @ 8:25 am
"Although a set of 12 coloured pencils would include brown, we never heard how to make "
I recall from chioldhood that if you mix all 3 primary colors (red blue & yellow) you get brown. Indeed, whenever yoiu get carried away and mix too many colors, it results in some sort of brown. Books aimed at small children tend to convey the impression that the world is full of clear examples of the basic colors, but really a lot of it is in the brown/tan/beige range.
On a related note: in discussing the rarity of natural blue thngs, the video notes that "of course" the ocean is blue, but in my experienve it isn't really. It's traditionally said to be blue. I've seen pictures where it's blue. People tell me the Caribbean and Mediterranean are really blue. But from my vantage point on the East Coast of the US, the Atlantic is more commonly green or gray.
Ken said,
May 13, 2026 @ 9:25 am
Randall Munroe at XKCD did a name-that-color survey which might be of some interest: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
Victor Mair said,
May 13, 2026 @ 9:26 am
I've been studying Central Asia and the Silk Road for five decades, and almost everything out there — including the camels! — is some tone / shade of brown. Except the oases (green) and the bodies of water (pools, ponds, lakes, creeks…) blue.
david said,
May 13, 2026 @ 11:08 am
@Victor Mair and @John Swindle:
“She” is too contrived. She has excess hand gestures that are not well correlated with the audio, it’s not a sign language for deaf viewers.
The wall behind her appears half blue and half grey with the border aligned with the part in her hair.
The observation that the preserved words attributed to Homer do not include blue is not evidence that there was no word for blue. He, or his rhapsodists, were not trying to describe the popular language usage for colors at their time. This comment is the first time I recall publishing the word blue.
Yves Rehbein said,
May 13, 2026 @ 12:12 pm
@Doug, the sea is blue because it reflects the sky, which is definitely blue due to Rayleigh scattering (xkcd 1145), green maybe because of algea.
Nonetheless, the ripple of water hieroglyph was black. "This glyph was conventionally colored black, or dark blue, suggestive of silt-laden Nile flood water which watered the "black land" (kmt)" (Wiktionary). The garden pool hieroglyph on the other hand was blue (Wikipedia: Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian). As for the winedark sea (οἶνοψ πόντος), I do not know the color of the wine hieroglyph (n.b. LLOG, "Linear Algebra and Wine"), but of Wine (jrp) and Vintner, Gardener (kꜣny), one looks a lot like cyan.
Yves Rehbein said,
May 13, 2026 @ 1:27 pm
But wait, the app is called something like airline and the people who accept that as a pun and think its funny are also more likely to need help. I did nazi that comming.
seth Kazan said,
May 13, 2026 @ 1:59 pm
What amused me most, besides the invention of the word "blue"
(the Sapir Whorf hypothesis being weak, which is obvious to me),
was the format on YouTube: I listened to the video dubbed in French by AI,
and it added a lot of vocal fry, which is rarely used by women in French,
which seems as strange as a language without "blue"…
Victor Mair said,
May 13, 2026 @ 4:03 pm
From Alan Kennedy:
Indigo is one of the most common plant dyes, found in many parts of the world. More importantly, it does not require a mordant, unlike virtually ever other plant and animal-derived dye. After dipping fibers in an indigo-dye vat, and removing them, the color is fixed by contact with oxygen in the air. Each successive dipping and removal results in a deeper shade of blue (as we use the color term).
Therefore, it may be more relevant to examine various words for indigo in cultures around the world in order to get a sense of cross-cultural ideas of 'blueness'.
HTI said,
May 13, 2026 @ 4:25 pm
There’s a thoughtful and well-researched article that I think demonstrates pretty conclusively that the Berlin–Kay programme etc. is pseudoscience. Recommended reading.
Barbara Saunders, 1995. Disinterring Basic Color Terms: a study in the mystique of cognitivism. History of the Human Sciences vol. 8, № 4, pp. 19–38. doi:10.1177/095269519500800402
RfP said,
May 13, 2026 @ 5:26 pm
@HTI: There’s a thoughtful and well-researched article that I think demonstrates pretty conclusively that the Berlin–Kay programme etc. is pseudoscience. Recommended reading.
Barbara Saunders, 1995. Disinterring Basic Color Terms: a study in the mystique of cognitivism. History of the Human Sciences vol. 8, № 4, pp. 19–38. doi:10.1177/095269519500800402
Thanks, HTI!
There’s a PDF of this article at:
https://ia800108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24/items/wikipedia-scholarly-sources-corpus/10.1177%252F0951692898010004002.zip&file=10.1177%252F095269519500800402.pdf
Chips Mackinolty said,
May 14, 2026 @ 2:20 am
For what it's worth, as a designer and printer of over 50 years, I have worked with lots of colour: some straight out of the can, others mixed in another container, or, in the case of screen printing, sometimes squeegee mixed in place on the screen.
Much of my colour work over decades has been driven by requirements of the 4-colour CMYK –either literally as four plates each carrying one of the CMYK colours: Cyan Magenta Yellow Black, or computer-driven CYMK separations which can be printed in "full colour" as a single "run". See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK_color_model
The result in my life is I can "see" or create colours via CMYK without referring to colours such as "blue".
In many cases, there are CMYK standards, such as the US flag:
The US Flag's official colors for printing (CMYK) are Old Glory Red (0, 90, 77, 28) and Old Glory Blue (94, 73, 0, 57), often paired with white (0, 0, 0, 0). These codes are based on specifications from the Standard Color Reference of America to ensure accurate reproduction in print media.
Julian said,
May 14, 2026 @ 6:38 pm
I would assume it's AI because the presenter is not named. Is that reasonable?
Martin Schwartz said,
May 14, 2026 @ 9:03 pm
@Lucas Christopoulos: kuváne in Tsak. means 'black',
and not just for snakes. The úTHi must be from Proro-Greek
*okhwi-, whence Anc. Gr. ophis > Mod. fí∂i. My 1963 Tyrós paréa
(hangout company) kuváne úTHI = mávro fí∂i was mentioned humorously I hope you rec'd my 2 emailed articles showing that
Asklepios was connected with anc. Near Eastern healing gods, among whom a snake pierced on a lance/spear, whence, I say, Asklepios'
serpent rod. Is KYANH attested in anc. Lakonia as adj. with 'snake'??
I still remember lots of Tsakonian, a paradise for Greek historical linguistics.
@Yves Rehbein: Re the last sentence of your email @Doug:
The Anc. Eg. word for 'wine' which you mention gives Anc. Gr,
erpis in frag. of the poet Hipponax. I think you mean the
the Anc. Eg. word for 'vintner, gardener' looks like "cyan",
but I believe it must be k3my with -m-, from k3m 'garden, vineyard',
which is related to Heb, kerem karm-, Arab. karm 'garden' etc.;
the Eg. glide consonant 3 corresponds to Sem. -r- elsewhere.
Btw the Homeric cmpd. is lit. "wine-faced' rather than 'wine-dark'.
Martin Schwartz
Lucas Christopoulos said,
May 14, 2026 @ 9:27 pm
Thank you, Martin.
I didn’t receive your articles, so please send them to me again. I’ll also try to find your email address.
Does “Kuane” supposedly mean blue and not black? Was “mávro fídi” (“black snake”) mentioned humorously? a mamba? green or black?
As for the Eastern snake associated with the Mesopotamian gods, the caduceus indeed seems to have originated from there.
Martin Schwartz said,
May 14, 2026 @ 11:56 pm
Victor, please send Lucas my email addreess.
If you have his, with his consent, pls send me that.
Martin
Chris Button said,
May 15, 2026 @ 6:33 am
Alan Kennedy's excellent comment has me thinking about that purple cabbage post a year or so ago.
Judy Pokras said,
May 15, 2026 @ 9:03 am
David Marjanović wrote:
Pink isn't light red (i.e. closer to orange), it's pastel red ("mixed" with white).
As an artist (among other creative pursuits), I prefer to add some blue to red and white in order to get pink. Just saying.
I did find her discussion very interesting, as one demonstration of the ways our language(s) shape our perceptions.
(I happened upon this blog when one blog led to another and another, starting out by my looking up the lyrics to “Puff the Magic Dragon”, the first two lines of which inexplicably came into my head as I was waking up today. I couldn’t remember the others, and needed to. I’m an ENFP, with endless curiosity. My current passion is writing playful surreal song lyrics.
Victor Mair said,
May 15, 2026 @ 9:06 am
From Mehmet Olmez:
We still have a 'problem' to understand / to translate "Kök Türk (~ Türük)" which occurs in Old Turkic inscriptions from Mongolia (AD 732): what is the word KÖK(TÜRK)? Normally KÖK has three meanings: "blue; gray".
Of course there are some explanations from W. Radloff to S. Tezcan, but there are still some dark points to understanding KÖK in KÖK TÜRÜK.
Victor Mair said,
May 15, 2026 @ 9:30 am
From Peter Golden:
To the excellent suggestion of Mehmet Ölmez, one might add the article by V.V Tishin, К дискуссии об интерпретации сочетания kök türk // Тюркологические исследования. 2018. Т. 1. № 1. С. 7-27
pdf available
Tom said,
May 15, 2026 @ 6:49 pm
Although we often think of the world as land, it is mostly water. Similarly, we think of a landscape as mostly land, but it's half sky. This fact really struck me when I was in Mongolia. On the steppe, the blue expanse over the green/brown expanse really makes an impression. It is another example, like blueberries vs leaves, of needing to distinguish blue and green.
My father teaches painting in university and says pink is a form red (i.e., not close to orange). He's talking about mixing pigments though, not the subjective experience of color or the mixing of light (which produces different colors from mixing pigments).
VMartin said,
May 16, 2026 @ 9:40 am
In the Bible, the word heaven is in the first sentence. In both Latin (caeruelus) and Polish (niebieski), this adjective for blue is derived directly from heaven. I will not go into Nikolay Marr's remarkable considerations about the connection between the names of birds, waters, and the sky and the name of the goddess Ishtar. I will just add that the Russian name for blue, голубой, mentioned in the presentation, is directly from the word pigeon. In ancient Greek, pigeon is said περ-ιστερ-ά. The famous Ishtar Gate is blue. And then there is also the famous Strauss waltz On The Beautiful Blue Danube. The ancient name for the Danube is Istros. Perhaps the word blue is exactly the opposite of what Darwinian stories about "origin of colors" and "survival" claim.
Yves Rehbein said,
May 16, 2026 @ 12:39 pm
@VMartin, the root PIE **nebʰ- is not a simple one. Wiktionary glosses "to become damp, cloudy" in one instances, arbitrary as the community is, but this is typologically common, e.g. also in Austro-Asiatic (my question being if there is an etymological connection)*. So that would be in line with "blue" patterning with "dark" colors.
Maria João Durão argues similar to a previous commenter, "… colors were placed in a scale between the light and the dark, being discriminated as much by the hue as by the luster; …". Maria picks up the thought after a few paragraphs: "The Greeks would then have to have either a black pigment capable of appearing blue or a blue described as black, … which of course they had. … Indeed, the word mélas (…), which designates black, does not always denote dark in an absolute sense, but any color that appears darker than others nearby or that can darken." Did the Ancient Greeks perceive the color 'blue'?. It is among the first results using the appropriate search terms ("Homer Greek color"), but I just cannot remember where I had originally heard of it.
*: AA notwithstanding, I'd go so far as to compare the Hittite l-shifted cognate** to lapis. That's a remarkable coincidence since we have already discussed heaven as potential cognate to Young Avestan asman "stone; sky, heaven" — quite similar to Egyptian kꜣny > kꜣm (cf. Wiktionary) –. N.B: Chris Button considers 天 possibly related.
**: regular cognates are Hittite nepiš-, Luwian tappaš- "sky", tapāla "storm clouds", but I mean Hittite alpad "cloud" (cf. Latin albus "white") should be comparable since laman "name" is also related to name, Polish imię(differently nazwa). This side of the argument would fit 天 OC /*l̥ˤi[n]/ (Baxter–Sagart; pace Chris Button with OC *xjəm and IE kʲəm-).
Kimball Kramer said,
May 16, 2026 @ 3:43 pm
Russian has two words and two perceived colors for what we perceive and name as one color: blue. We do the same thing: we perceive and name orange as a different color from dark orange, which we perceive as brown and so name it. To check this, download a color utility and create orange:
ORANGE: RGB: 255, 165, 0; HSV: 35º, 100%, 100%.
And then…
BROWN: RBG: 150, 75, 0; HSV: 34º, 100%, 59%.
These numbers will vary as differing shades of the 2 colors are chosen, but note that the "2" colors vary in HSV only in the lightness or value category.
Michael L said,
May 19, 2026 @ 5:16 am
Just on messenger rather than message: there seems nothing odd about the presenter to my eyes and ears. The hand movements seem entirely natural and are perfectly synchronised to her spoken delivery. Individuals vary as to how strongly they use their hands in this way, anyway, and one feels loath to judge. I notice that she has a very minor trip over wording of 'Berlin-Kay' at about 3.14; I don't think an AI would do that. There are naturalistic variations in emphasis and confidence / nervousness over delivery of technical points. There seem also to be a few video freezes early on, perhaps because she's spliced in a re-edit, but then once got going became more confident?
But, yes, I do feel she ought to be named…
David Marjanović said,
May 19, 2026 @ 5:51 pm
Indigo was not widely known until rather recently; the word is a loan not only in English, but e.g. all over Europe.
And green, right? – I've taken for granted it's simply the general color of the sky; note it's turquoise in the flag of Kazakhstan, unlike the unequivocal blue in the flag of Ukraine.
See, that's the kind of pseudoscience Marr is so infamous for. The Danube is as blue or not blue as any other river, depending on the weather and the sun (pers. obs.). Ἴστρος is "the vigorous one", Proto-Indo-European *h₁ish₂rós plus stress shift to turn the adjective into a noun, in a language that (like Germanic and Slavic but unlike Greek or Celtic) dropped every *h₂ between any two consonants and inserted *t into every *sr; another river name from that branch of IE in the general region is the Στρυμών < PIE *srumṓn "the streaming one". I mentioned Celtic because the Celtic treatment of *h₂ between two consonants gives you the Isar, the river that flows through Munich.
The Slavic "sky" word is straightforwardly from *nebʰ-es-. Polish derives "blue" from "sky", but I'm not aware of any other Slavic language that does.
That's "designation", in which na- is the usual prefix.
David Marjanović said,
May 19, 2026 @ 5:58 pm
The color that represents the sky in the flag, I mean.
Also, the Isar is feminine, so it's from *h₁ish₂réh₂ > Pre-Italo-Celtic (or so) *hishəráh > Proto-Celtic *isarā.
Chris Button said,
May 19, 2026 @ 6:02 pm
@ Yves Rehbein
I've thrown out a lot of ideas regarding 天 and 祆 on Llog. It's a thorny one. The shift of an -m coda (as attested in the Middle Chinese reflex of 忝) to -ɲ is regular in a Pulleyblankian system, but the initial remains problematic. Pulleyblank sensibly proposed a lateral onset rather than the same onset as 丁– a proposal which others have then copied. But then separately there is the whole possible graphic and phonetic connection with 丁, which has been posited by others.
VMartin said,
May 20, 2026 @ 1:27 am
I mentioned the Blue Danube to illustrate the connection with Ishtar/Ister. Nikolay Marr does not mention this at all. I have no idea what colors the Danube had 2000 years ago. Franz von Gerneth wrote it in 1890 as follows:
Donau, so blau, durch Tal und Au,
wogst ruhig du hin, dich grüßt unser Wien..
The Ukrainian river Dniester is also often said to be blue.
The "Blue Dniester" (syniy Dniester) is a well-known traditional handmade Ukrainian beaded necklace or choker (known as a nyzanka).
VMartin said,
May 20, 2026 @ 2:52 am
AI claims that the name Ister (Danube) has nothing to do with Ishtar, that it is wrong etymology. Instead:
It comes from a Daco-Thracian root meaning "strong" or "swift"… The Thracian hydronym is closely related to similar Indo-European water words, such as Sanskrit iṣiras (meaning "swift").
And asking AI if we can call Danube a swift river, the answer is:
No, you would not typically call the Danube "a swift river" in common, everyday English.
Instead, it is almost universally described as broad, majestic, or slow-moving. [1]
In English, the phrase "swift river" triggers a specific visual image: a small, rocky, rushing mountain stream or a wild whitewater river. The Danube is a massive, deep, and wide continental highway. Calling it a swift river is like calling an ocean liner a speedboat—it just doesn't match the scale.
Lucas Christopoulos said,
May 20, 2026 @ 6:38 am
Sanskrit iṣiras as a Daco-Thracian root meaning "strong" or "swift"…
In Greek: ἰσχυρός (Strong, mighty). For Ἴστρος-Danube: https://grokipedia.com/page/istrus_mythology
David Marjanović said,
May 20, 2026 @ 12:27 pm
"Thraco-Dacian"… oh dear. This is outdated by a century, easily. iṣirás is exactly the regular Sanskrit outcome of PIE *h₁ish₂rós. And while the very poorly attested Dacian apparently was an IE language, there's little to no evidence that the similarly poorly attested Thracian language was one as well; indeed, there's so little even vaguely IE-like in the few known words that that in itself is evidence against IE membership. (Discussion here, starting with a link to the preprint that presents that argument at length.)
That sounds similar today, but can't be related. If it's of IE origin at all, you're going to need some sort of *gʰ to explain the χ. The latest Etymological Dictionary of [Ancient] Greek has it on p. 603–604 (bottom right corner of what I'm linking to, plus top left of the next page); the last sentence is: "Pre-Greek origin seems quite possible." – that means the author gives up and wonders if it's a loanword ("Pre-Greek" is what he calls the supposedly single and supposedly non-IE language that was spoken in Greece before Greek was spoken there).
"Fact-checked by Grok 4 months ago". For crying out loud. But the section "Name Origins" is basically a confused version of what I tried to say. :-) It only goes beyond that in trying to identify the IE branch I did not identify and calling it "Thracian", which seemed a generally reasonable possibility until the preprint linked to above came out.
It's not slow, no. And when it floods, it gets really powerful.
David Marjanović said,
May 20, 2026 @ 12:28 pm
Oops, sorry for all the italics.
Lucas Christopoulos said,
May 20, 2026 @ 6:45 pm
"supposedly non-Indo-European language spoken in Greece before Greek itself was spoken there." It covers a vast span of space and time. Are you referring to the Aegean languages before 3000 BC?. Anatolian languages, or the languages of Northern Greece? If not the Minoans, then perhaps the Vinča scripts?
VMartin said,
May 20, 2026 @ 11:55 pm
According to AI the etymology of latin word sinister (sinis-ter) is unknown. But let me speculate – what about sin-ister? Or even sine-ister? Sin is in uralic Udmurt language the sky. Marr claims that Russian word for blue синий is derived from it. Another word голубой is derived from the pigeon, in old greek περ-ιστερ-ά. Then we have here the blue Ister (Danube), the blue Dniester and blue babylonian Ishtar gate. Now AI claims:
While the word sinister physically meant "left-handed," its metaphorical transition into meaning "evil" mirrors how the Romans culturally despised the color blue. [1]
To the ancient Romans, blue was not a color of peace or sky; it was the color of their fiercest enemies
Yves Rehbein said,
May 23, 2026 @ 11:22 pm
What is this enigmatic alphabet soup supposed to be? S-aorist of the deictic particle *(H)y? Or perhaps a Luwian /istr(i)-/ "hand", compare χέρ-νιψ ~ χέρ-νιβος f. ‘water for washing the hands’ and Albanian dorë "hand"?
Chris Button said,
May 24, 2026 @ 5:05 pm
A "clear L" versus "dark L" contrast would actually handle this quite nicely.
Chris Button said,
May 24, 2026 @ 6:36 pm
Alternatively something like [k͡ɬ] could work well too.
Chris Button said,
May 24, 2026 @ 6:55 pm
There's a t- ~ k- alternation in reflexes from k͡l- , so a tʰ- ~ x- alternation in reflexes from k͡ɬ- would hardly be untoward.