People are being misled about colours in ancient Greek, yet again, by people who don't know ancient Greek. This time it's @AsapSCIENCE.

Guys, I know you're just repeating what you've read. But the people you're reading don't know ancient Greek either.

Languages divide up the colour palette in different ways. English is hugely biased towards 'blue' -- 'blue' takes up a full third of a colour wheel!

Greek divides that enormous area up into smaller regions. http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/05/ancient-greek-colours.html

You, and everyone you've been reading, have been relying on translations into English. In other words, the divisions of the colour palette _in English_ have skewed the whole investigation from the beginning. http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/05/ancient-greek-colours.html

It's true Homer doesn't mention 'blue'. That's because he wasn't writing in English.

But he does mention /glaukos/ 94 times, /kyaneos/ 18 times, and /lampros/ 12 times.

All of these overlap with the part of the colour palette that English lumps into a single colour term: blue.

The words don't always refer to things that an English-speaker would call 'blue'. But they often do.

Similarly 'yellow' doesn't appear in Homer either -- but /xanthos/ does appear 35 times, and /ochros/ appears twice.

'Green' doesn't appear in Homer, but /chloros/ and /glaukos/ appear a lot. 'Black' doesn't appear either, but 'melas' appears 201 times.

The regions of the colour palette that these colours occupy don't correspond consistently to the regions in English colour terms.

For example, /melas/ is traditionally translated as 'black'. In reality, it means a range of shades: darkish red and brown, and dimmer shades, dimming all the way towards black. 'Black' has a much narrower meaning than /melas/.

Similarly /kyaneos/ has a similar idea but on the opposite side of the colour wheel: a shade of blue, and dimmer shades all the way towards black.

Very little that is true has appeared in scientific journals in the last 20 years about colour terms in ancient languages.

If language trained our brains as much as all that, the logic would work the other way too: Greek has a word, /glaukos/, which means the colour of a clear sky and of vine leaves. English doesn’t. Therefore English-speakers can’t perceive the colour of the sky or of vine leaves!