In the end of 8th century, Homer, the Greek poet, published one of the greatest literary works in Western culture – the Odyssey, which is the second book of a two-part epic poem that touches on the Trojan War and, specifically for the Odyssey, describes Odysseus’ journey back home after the fall of Troy.
During Odysseus’ journey, he ends up sailing over what Homer describes as a “wine-dark sea”. So… obviously having a dark red sea isn’t normal. Does that mean Homer was color blind or simply being lyrical when he wrote that passage? It is an epic poem, which may make you think that, but in reality, it was red – well, not our red, but it his red.
“Now have I put in here, as thou seest, with ship and crew, while sailing over the wine-dark sea to men of strange speech, on my way to Temese for copper; and I bear with me shining iron.”
It turns out that languages develop certain words for colors over time. If you don’t have a word for the color, then it can’t really exist. Think of the old “if a tree falls in the woods, does anyone hear it?” example. In Homer’s writing, the sea really was red to him, so he wrote that Odysseus was sailing on a red sea. What’s even more interesting is that languages develop colors in a certain order and depending on how old the language is, it may only have two colors. Paul Kay and Brent Berlin bread this color sequence down in their 1973 research paper Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution.
According to Paul and Brent, Colors develop in the following order:
- Black and White
- Red
- Green or Yellow
- Blue
- Brown
- Purple, orange, Pink or grey
Here’s a quick example of how these colors developed for the English language.
Black: The term “black” was established four to five thousand years ago from Proto-Indo-european (PIE), which is the ancestor to all Indo-European languages – Europe, India, Anatolia, and Iran – the actual word for black originally was swart, which meant shiny and dark.
White: Like black, white traces its origin to PIE around the same time. The term is was originally *kwit and was pronounced similarly to the word quite.
Red: Another PIE word, red was originally *Reudh and the root changed over time to read in Old English. It technically should’ve been pronounced as “raid” or “read”, but ended up being pronounced as it is today, red.
Yellow: Another PIE word (and the last), yellow came from *ghel.
Green: Came from Old Norse as Graenn, which was derived from *ghre PIE which meant “to grow”.
Blue: Derived from the same word in PIE for black (swart), blue and was established in early 1200 as the term bleu.
Brown: Comes in around late 1200 in old englsh.
Purple: Established in the early 1400s as purpul and originated as the color for a dye.
Pink: Established in 1733 after the flowers called “pinks”. Before this was created, the closest word to pink was incarnate, which meant flesh-colored.
Orange: Originally termed as naranga after the fruit and made it into the English language in the early 1500s.
Grey: Many languages get late, but in English, it was first recorded as a usage in Old English around 700 AD.
It’s a lot of information that doesn’t influence daily life, but how we develop terms for colors is a great example of how knowledge is continually developed over time with the addition of details that uncover a broad-spectrum of ideas – you just need to know where to look.