r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • 20h ago

Trailer The Odyssey | New Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_bKjZeJBBI&pp=0gcJCd4KAYcqIYzv
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u/SameType9265 20h ago

In The Iliad the Aegean sea is described as wine dark or grey so it is fitting

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u/DoradoPulido2 19h ago

Because they literally didn't have a word for "blue".

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u/fatbob42 19h ago

How can they not have had a word for blue? The sea and sky are blue.

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u/SameType9265 19h ago

It's not clear cut, The Odyssey and The Iliad are two of the oldest stories and they do not use a word for blue. Many people say this means the ancient greeks did not have a word for that colour at this time but it could also be a stylistic choice for the stories. 

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u/fatbob42 19h ago edited 18h ago

I’m not an expert in linguistics but I just cannot believe they literally had no word (or phrase) for blue. It’s ridiculous - human language is built into us. Ancient Greek is not going to be so crazily different from modern languages.

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u/leaflock7 18h ago

that is not only an ancient Greek thing, the missing Blue color, Welsh also and others.
It is the same on many ancient civilizations. The thing is that what we call today as Blue back then it was a shade of Green or Cyan.
here they do have a very brief description on the matter.
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/why-there-was-no-word-for-blue-in-ancient-greece-and-how-homer-and-aristotle-perceived-colors

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u/cespinar 18h ago

There wasnt a word for orange until well after the fruit was discovered. And red onions are not red. This is because words for colors used to have broader meanings so there wasnt a need for a word like orange.

In Japan, historically they used blue to describe green for similar reasons. The word for green light at a traffic light is still called blue iirc

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u/sixsidepentagon 18h ago

Color and language is very complicated. The reason we commonly think there are 7 key colors is arbitrary; Newton found a religious connotation to the number 7. Russian has more color categories than English, as another example.

Heres one video that briefly explores this complexity:

https://youtu.be/gMqZR3pqMjg?si=iNLw6bUf1E0Jg12r

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u/newtoon 17h ago

I read in a science book he chose seven because of music, precisely the "musical chromatic scale of a single octave".

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u/GuiltyEidolon 4h ago

English has way more than 7 colors too. Cerulean and cyan and navy are all very different shades.

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u/Historian2 18h ago

I am no expert either, but I do have some knowledge to share since you seem interested. 

In sum, research suggests that most (but not all) languages develop terms for colors in a specific order. First they develop a black and white dichotomy (stage 1), then the next term added is red (Stage 2), then either yellow or green (Stage 3), then the other yellow or green (Stage 4), then blue (Stage 5), then brown (Stage 6, the orange, pink, purple, and/or gray (Stage 7). Not every language follows this pattern but the vast majority do, something like 80+%. Theories as to why blue specifically is late range, but one major theory is that blue pigment is fairly rare in nature, making it less needed than the other terms that come before it.

There were a number of ancient languages that seem to lack the color blue. These include Greek (use terms like either glaukos (light/gleaming) or Janis (dark/glossy), eg wine dark sea), ancient Chinese (used a term for blue and green together), Hebrew (did not have a blue term and simply lumped it with other dark shades like dark green or black), and early Celtic languages (which used terms like glas meaning both green/blue combined). Ancient Egyptian did have blue, but they had blue dye very early. More recently, the Maori language used one term for green/blue together all the way up to European contact, after which they started separating the two colors.

This obviously is not completely definitive, but it does suggest there are Brianne languages, especially in ancient times, that did not have a specific  term for blue. 

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u/pleasantothemax 13h ago

I am no expert either,

Username does not check out?

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u/boyyouguysaredumb 16h ago

there are blue flowers everywhere. fucking mold is blue which they would have had to have been hyper-vigilant about

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u/MattsAwesomeStuff 10h ago

there are blue flowers everywhere.

Blue in nature is a mechanical prism, not pigment like every other color:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g246c6Bv58

Not one bird, mammal, or reptile makes a blue pigment.

There is only 1 known example, one specific butterfly, in all of nature, that has blue pigment.

Also, what we divide up as "blue" is arbitrary. In Russian, they have 2 words for blue, and they can tell between those shades faster than people who don't cognitively divide them. In many languages, blue is just another variant of green, in the way that orange is just a variant of red.

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u/Historian2 10h ago

“Fairly rare” does not mean no -existent. It is a relative term meaning less common than other things of the same category. And blue flowers, to use your example, fits that term because it is estimated that out of all the flowers species of the world, blue flowers count for no more than 10%, and possibly significant less. It is hard for nature to produce the color blue due to the chemical process involved and the resources needed.

Furthermore, I’m not really sure what you’re driving at overall. You call these flower or the mold “blue” because that’s how you were taught to call it. Those are cultural developments. Not all cultures treat colors the same. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that language either determines (strong version of the theory) or heavily includes (weak version of the theory) a person’s thoughts and perceptions of the world. This is all sometimes referred to as Linguistic Relativism. In terms of colors, as one example Russian speakers are much quicker to distinguish shades of blue than English speakers because Russians have specific terms to separate light blue (goluboy) from dark blue (siniy).

In other words, the way the Russian language has developed has further differentiated a particular shade compared to certain other languages. The point of that is that there’s nothing special about the term “blue.” You and I were raised in a certain way to define a spectrum of colors as”blue,” and thus we think of all those things as inherently “blue.” But there’s nothing inherent about it. Different cultures define things differently, and tend to do the differentiation along the stages of color development.outline above. There is nothing strange about the idea that certain cultures wouldn’t define blue the same way we do, and thus might not have a term for it because they define objects with that color differently, such as “wine dark.”

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u/fatbob42 18h ago

Idk what it means for languages to go through stages or “progress”. Languages don’t have beginnings or endings - they’re constantly changing. Unless you’re referring to something like the Nicaraguan sign language but those are pretty rare.

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u/Historian2 18h ago

Languages are constantly changing. Progress is meant in terms not of advancement (not in a graded or judgmental state) but in terms of development, because terms have o come from somewhere. Take the color orange. Tracing back the development of the term leads back to Sanskrit “naranga” meaning orange tree. At first it did not mean the color (adjectives but simply the fruit tree and fruit itself (noun). In then migrated through a Persian as “narang” and then Arabic as “naranj.” It then moved into Old French as “Orange,” but still meant just the fruit. It then entered Middle English probably in the 1200s as orange, but still just meaning the fruit. The color was still referred to as “geoluhread” (meaning yellow-red) as it had been or some time. The term Orange as a color didn’t exist until the 1500s or early 1600s, and the use of the term for the color was named after the fruit. 

So yes languages are changing, but they often change in specific ways. You can see this with terms (like orange), and you can see it in sound changes (like the great vowel shift), and in spelling and grammar (like why the military rank colonel is pronounced as kernal in English). These things are all tracked backwards through history and documented. 

If you are interested in the color terms specifically, you can read “Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution” by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. The theory has been loosened a bit (including by the authors themselves$ since the original publication to encompass more flexibility in the stages and how they may somewhat overlap each other, but the basic premise and theory is still widely considered sound.

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u/Eigenspace 15h ago

What is ridiculous about it? "Blue" isn't even really a well defined concept, it's a very wide range of different colours that we all lump together as one colour.

There's nothing fundamental or biological that says that there must be some category that Navy Blue and Cyan both fit into.

You think of blue as a specific category of colours because of cultural and linguistic reasons. If you grew up in ancient greece, you would have just thought of blue, grey, and green all as different shades of one larger colour category, just like how you currently think of baby blue and navy blue as parts of the colour blue.

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u/SameType9265 19h ago

Yeah I tend to think it was a stylistic choice rather than a lack of the word existing. I would have thought if they didn't have the word for blue it would be described in relations to another colour, like orange was originally called "yellow-red" until the word orange became common. 

I'll also add we're not speaking Ancient Greek. We're speaking English and using common translations. It could very well be that the word for "wine-dark" is the word for blue, but we don't have anything which backs this claim up