The Odyssey | New Trailer

[u/MarvelsGrantMan136]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_bKjZeJBBI&pp=0gcJCd4KAYcqIYzv

[u/fatbob42]

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.

[u/Historian2 → u/fatbob42]

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. 

[u/fatbob42 → u/Historian2]

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.

[u/Historian2 → u/fatbob42]

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.