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Why the Ancient Greeks Couldn't See the Colour Blue
A review of Guy Deutscher's 'Through the Looking Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages'
When you study translation theory, you quickly establish a couple of things: 1) Academics can’t agree on anything; and 2) Reading articles about language can be pretty tough-going.
Like many academic articles, pieces on language can often suffer from turgid prose. But thankfully, not all authors possess the gift of the drab. In Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, Israeli linguist Guy Deutscher has written a delightful book about a question bound to arouse anyone’s curiosity: how does the language we speak shape how we perceive life, the universe, and everything else?
At the start of the book, Deutscher talks about Homer, and why in his epics The Iliad and The Odyssey, the first ‘great’ poet of western civilisation described the sea as oînops, or ‘wine-dark’. The strange description has baffled people for centuries, and while some saw ‘wine dark’ as nothing more than poetic licence at play, nineteenth century British prime minister William Gladstone went so far as to suggest that the ancients were partially colour blind. The reason the sea was described as a shade of wine, Gladstone speculated, was because Homer, and all his contemporaries, couldn’t see the colour blue.
As modern science joined ranks with the then prevalent colonialist worldview of nineteenth century Europe, Gladstone’s ideas began to take hold. What began as a politician’s intellectual flight of fancy was quickly adopted as evidence of the White Man’s inherent racial superiority. Given the recent publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, it had become popular for academics to apply the theory of evolution to anything and everything.
To that end, building on Gladstone’s theory, German scientist Hugo Magnus argued that the human race had progressed in its ability to distinguish between colours. So while people in the Homeric period could only distinguish between red, orange, and yellow, by the nineteenth century the European eye was able to see blue and violet.
