Oinopa ponton

It is well known that many colors we take for granted had no name for a long time, and had no names in the central texts in Western culture. Ancient Mediterranean texts, both Greek and Semitic, also had a reduced vocabulary of a small number of colors polarized around the dark and the light – Homer and his contemporaries were limited to about three or four main colors: black, white, and some indeterminate part of the rainbow, often subsumed as red, or yellow.

I contacted Guy Deutscher. He was extremely generous with his help and pointed out to me that the ancients even lacked words for something as elementary as blue. This absence of the word “blue” in ancient Greek explains the recurring reference by Homer to the “wine-dark sea” (oinopa ponton), which has been quite puzzling to readers.

Interestingly, it was the British Prime Minister William Gladstone who first make this discovery in 1850s (land was unfairly and thoughtlessly reviled for it by the usual journalists). Gladstone, quite an erudite, wrote, during his interregnum between political positions, an impressive seventeen hundred page treatise on Homer. In the last section, Gladstone announced this limitation of color vocabulary, attributing our modern sensitization to many more nuances of color to a cross-generational training of the eye. But regardless of these variations of color in the culture of the time, people were shown to be able to identify the nuances – unless physically color-blind. ~ Excerpt: Pages 35/36 (Antifragile by Niassim Taleb)