Were the Ancient Greeks colorblind?

If not, why does Homer talk about wine-dark seas, violet sheep, hyacinth hair, and faces green with fear?

It turns out it’s not just Homer who struggled with color. The authors of all the ancient texts did: the Indian Vedic poems, the Old Testament, the Icelandic sagas, and even the Quran.

Philologist Lazarus Geiger said of the Vedas:

“These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn’s play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and the ether, all these are unfolded before us over and over again, in splendor and vivid fullness. But there is only one thing that no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who did not already know it, and that is that the sky is blue.”

What could possible be going on? The answer lies in linguistic universals about how color terms evolve across languages.

In this issue of the Linguistic Discovery newsletter, we’ll look at Homer’s odd use of colors and what it tells us about the evolution of color terms in the world’s languages: