Stephen Fry on colour

The first episode of the new Radio 4 series Fry's English Delight looked at colour (listen for a few more days here).

 

Among the interesting points in the programme was the discovery in the 19th century by Gladstone, before he became prime minister, that Homer never used the word 'blue' in his writing - he described the sky as broad, starry and other things, but never blue. He also used other colour descriptions which sound odd today, such as describing the sea, and oxen, as wine-looking, honey as green, and sheep's wool as violet. Gladstone was much derided by classicists for his work (he had postulated that Gladstone was colour-blind), but a contemporary linguist, the German Lazarus Geiger, looked into the phenomenon more deeply and discovered that other ancient cultures described objects as being of a different colour than we would say today, so the Bible talks of green gold and red horses, for instance, and ancient Chinese, Indian and Icelandic literature is similar. Only ancient Egyptian, it seems, out of all the ancient cultures, had a word for blue. Guy Deutscher of Manchester University said that when languages begin to develop words for colours, red is always the first word created, regardless of the language, and blue is always one of the last - and some languages don't have a word for blue at all, or they don't distinguish between blue and green. Deutscher hypothesised that colour words developed for purely practical reasons; apart from the sky, there is not much else in nature that is blue, and, technologically, blue pigment was very difficult to produce, so ancient peoples did not have cause to talk about blue objects much.

 

Even tiny babies show a clear preference for the colour red, according to Dr Olwen Wilson, a child psychologist who appeared on the programme. She also said that children could only see that colours were different - blue and green, for instance - if their language had separate words for the shades.

 

Here is the programme on iPlayer, where it will remain until Episode 2 next Thursday.

Comments

[John]

Interesting, Susan, Although I guess I had never thought much about it, I would have thought that "colour" had always existed in languages. Even more surprising is that while the ancients may not have codified the concept, they did attribute colourful characteristics to things, but not as codified "colours" as we refer to them.

fyi - the iPlayer piece can be heard over here (but presently the "regionals", like Radio Merseyside, are not)

Thanks

[Jemmy Hope]

In Irish the word glas can mean green or grey, depending on what is being described - grey for people and (I think) animals, but green for inanimate objects. Just to confuse matters there is another word for grey - Uathne.

[Marc Leavitt]

Hi Susan:
For me, Homer's "wine-dark sea" simile always evoked a discrete image of something sensual, tactile, rich, alive with life and promise; colo(u)r as such never entered into it; he describes the sea like the blood of life, a metaphor that the maritime civilization of the Achaeans would have recognized.

For an excellent discussion of colo(u)r, I recommend a blog by Kory Stamper, a lexicographer over at Macmillan, entitled, " harmless drudgery", at korystamper.wordpress.com.

Cheers!

Marc

[Virtual Linguist]

Thank you for those comments. I never knew that about Irish, Jemmy - I see that a number of Irish social groups have 'Glas' in their name, so it must be positive (they mean green rather than grey, I suppose).
Thank you for the link, Marc. Very interesting; I've bookmarked it.
Have you tried listening to Radio Merseyside live over the internet, John, rather than via iPlayer? There's also Radio City, Liverpool's commercial radio station.

[Jemmy Hope]

That comment of mine is full of errors (too lazy to check). Firstly I misspelt the word uaine as uathne. Then I mistranslated it as grey when it should be green. The other word for grey I was trying to remember is liath.
As you point out, Susan, glas occurs in group names, e.g., an Páirtí Glas (the Green Party).

[M.K.]

Did you perhaps mean that Gladstone postulated that *Homer* was colourblind? That threw me for a minute. Great article!

[Virtual Linguist]

Thanks Jemmy. I didn't notice the typos, and don't suppose many others did.
As MK spotted, I made typos of my own in the piece. Yes, thanks, MK, I did mean 'Homer'. Thanks for the comment, and for dropping by and reading.