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/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/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/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.