Admittedly, that point is a very thin case on its own and is perhaps mostly an attention grabber. Especially as it's not a naturalist description, but has higher priorities (such as both being interesting to listen to and easy to remember, through the device of repeated, memorable descriptions, such as rose-fingered Eos, etc). I can easily subscribe to the "dark as wine" theory - especially as light and dark seemed to play a rather dominant role in colour descriptions.rainwarrior wrote:I think it's dubious to try to extrapolate ideas about the historical concept of "blue" from Homer's stock adjective for describing the sea
What is a bit more convincing is the frequency on colour names: There's zero descriptions of blue in the work of Homeros. On its own, it's just a peculiarity, but when other texts from different places have comparable frequencies, it starts to amount to something.
And then, philosophers of the time argued about what colours exist and how they should be named and categorized, such as the argument that the rainbow has four bands. Their business was understanding nature, so it's a pretty hands-on insight into what scholars thought at that time in that region, if you can overlook the varying inadequacy of translations.
Got to love etymology. Those dictionaries can take you on the weirdest rides!adam_smasher wrote:Happily, there's no need to guess about this stuff thanks to the Online Etymology Dictionary