Chapter 9
In: Brill's Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology
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Abstract
Colour terms in ancient Greek, specifically those used in Homer and archaic lyric poetry, have long played an integral part in the comparative work of linguistic anthropologists who study the words used for colours. Goethe, reacting to Sir Isaac Newton’s work on the spectrum, postulated that the Greeks of Homer’s time had defective vision. Around the time of the appearance of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, William Gladstone offered a similar thesis based on the limited vocabulary for colour in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and work in this vein continued with Magnus (1877). This chapter examines the application of this early work on Greek colour terminology to early work in the discipline of cultural linguistics. It investigates the shift from the nineteenth-century connection between vision and terminology (e.g. Geiger 1871 and Marty 1879) to the employment of colour terms, their number and use, as a means of determining what cultural linguists identified as the evolutionary status of a language in the first half of the twentieth century. Berlin and Kay employed this process in Basic Color Terms (1969), in which they used Homeric Greek as a comparandum to establish where modern languages sit on the evolutionary spectrum. This chapter pays special attention to how work by classicists on Greek colour terminology led to theories dealing with the historical development of language and the problematic nature of treating Homeric Greek as a dialect on par with Somali or Korean. It begins with the work of Goethe, Gladstone, Geiger, and Magnus, contextualizing with the science of colour and vision, then moves to the origins of cultural linguistics, before continuing to work by classicists on colour terms in the early twentieth century. Finally, it explores the place of Homeric Greek colour terminology in Berlin and Kay’s work on the evolution of colour terms, considering why Homeric Greek occupies a significant place in the overall study of colour terms.