Color words

 So the sea in the Odyssey is wine color.

Yes—and that famous Homeric phrase is a wonderful example of exactly what we were discussing about linguistic categories.

Homer repeatedly calls the sea οἶνοψ πόντος (oinops pontos), usually translated something like “wine-dark sea.” Oinops literally combines oinos (“wine”) with ōps (“appearance,” “eye,” or “looking”), so the idea is roughly “wine-looking.”

The puzzle is that Homer doesn't appear to be saying the sea is literally the color we would call red or purple. Ancient Greek color vocabulary and categorization don't map neatly onto ours. Oinops can evoke the appearance of wine without necessarily specifying a precise hue.

And there is an even more interesting wrinkle: Homer uses other apparently strange color descriptions—chloros can cover things we'd distinguish as green, yellow, or pale; kyanos can refer to dark blue, but also to very dark materials; and porphyreos has associations with purple but can describe various dark or changing colors.

So “wine-dark sea” may be less a failure of Homer to recognize blue than a reminder that color words don't necessarily divide the perceptual spectrum at the same boundaries in different languages.

Which brings us right back to your Vietnamese example: the physical colors are there, but the linguistic boxes we put them into are culturally and historically constructed. Homer gives us a particularly delicious case because we are trying to reverse-engineer the boxes from poetry written almost three millennia ago.

English seems to have a huge color vocabulary: crimson, cyan, violet, scarlet, etc.

Yes. English has an unusually fine-grained and rather promiscuous color vocabulary. We don't merely have basic terms like red, blue, green, and yellow; we've accumulated names from flowers, dyes, minerals, textiles, foods, and other languages.

And the interesting thing is that many of these aren't really competing with the basic color words. They occupy little semantic territories within them:

    red → crimson, scarlet, vermilion, carmine, ruby, burgundy, maroon...

    blue → azure, cobalt, navy, cerulean, cyan, turquoise...

    purple → violet, mauve, lavender, magenta, plum...

    green → emerald, olive, lime, jade, chartreuse...

Some are fairly precise color distinctions; others are strongly associated with an object or material. Olive doesn't simply mean a particular point on the spectrum—it invokes the characteristic color of olives. Cobalt similarly carries a material association.

There's also a fascinating historical process here. English didn't sit down and decide, "We need 47 words for colors." It kept borrowing and specializing words as circumstances demanded. Crimson ultimately comes through the history of dyes; scarlet originally had associations with a costly dyed cloth; azure came through French from Arabic/Persian; cyan comes from Greek.

So English's apparent richness is partly a consequence of its enormous lexical accumulation. A person can say "blue" and be perfectly intelligible, but if painting, fashion, printing, photography, chemistry, or heraldry requires greater precision, English has an enormous stockpile available.

And that makes an interesting contrast with Homer. We might look at wine-dark sea and think, "Why didn't he just say blue?" But that's rather like asking why someone says crimson instead of red. The question assumes that the two languages have already decided to divide the perceptual world in the same places. They haven't.

I remember at some age realizing that silver is not white.

Exactly. And that's a surprisingly profound little childhood discovery.

Silver and white can have nearly the same average brightness, but silver has a visual property that white doesn't: specular reflection. A white object looks white under almost any lighting because its surface diffusely reflects light. A silver object is constantly telling you, "I'm reflecting whatever is around me." Its apparent color can therefore change dramatically with its surroundings.

A child's early category might be something like:

    white things → paper, clouds, milk
    silver things → coins, spoons, metal

But at some point you notice that silver isn't really a color in quite the same sense. A silver spoon can reflect a black shirt, a blue sky, or a yellow wall and still be recognizably silver.

The same thing happens with gold. "Gold" is nominally a color word, but a convincing gold surface isn't simply yellow. It needs the characteristic combination of yellowish coloration and metallic reflection.

And this is another nice example of the point you were making earlier: our vocabulary doesn't merely label what the eye receives; it reflects the categories we've learned to make from it. A child learns "silver" as though it were a simple color. Later, experience reveals that it is partly a surface/material category rather than merely a location on the color spectrum.

In fact, silver is a particularly good demonstration that color and appearance aren't the same thing.