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They say of the Parthenon (being at the Acropolis)... that it used to be daubed with red, blue (apparently bronze at the time) and green colours. Sending love from Greece, amazing show. Huge fan!
It took me awhile to appreciate Johnny Vegas, because I grew up around several people who had his apparent density and buffoonery, but lacked his wit and depth. I still prefer the wit of Phil Jupitus, but have come to recognize and enjoy the talent Johnny Vegas possesses.
I'm assuming the bronze they meant was a weathered, greenish bronze, not that coppery, red they showed. As a lot of people have pointed out, the blue/green separation in languages tends to show up rather late. Light, Dark, and Red tend to show up fairly early, as I understand. Of course, people being how they are, none of this is absolutely universal.
Look up pictures of bronze. "fresh" bronze is reddish but old bronze is more going in to black. The green corrosion you mean is actually on copper roofs and pipes. There is an interesting video by vox about different cultures and there different color perception. In the Iliad the water was also described as red.
@@WillLaPuerta You can really see why they'd call it bronze really - some of those shades really lean towards teal/cyan. IIRC, Homer also referred to the sea as 'wine dark'.
@@Sam-kj9ui I think you forgot that A) Bronze is mostly copper. B) If you spend two seconds to look up pictures of aged bronze you'd see that it comes in a wide variety of patinas, including green. And C) We already had this conversation 9 months ago. Did you even consider reading the other comments? "Thank you for incorrecting me."
It's simply not true that the ancient Greeks lacked a word for the color blue. This is partly due to a simple misunderstanding: William Gladstone, the British P.M. and amateur classicist, popularized the idea that the noun _κύανος_ and the derived adjective _κυάνεος_ refer to bronze. This has been known for a long time to be incorrect - _κύανος_ actually denotes a type of dark blue enamel - but, alas, the myth persists. (Incidentally, _κύανος_ is the etymon of the English word "cyan.") Another word that Homer applies to the sea, _γλαυκός,_ really did start out with a non-color-related meaning: it originally just meant "bright" or "gleaming." However, over time that word also came to signify a kind of light blue color. Classical authors such as Sophocles, Euripedes, and Aristotle frequently use _γλαυκός_ in this way, particularly in connection with human eyes and bodies of water. (The word _γλαυκός_ likewise gave us the word "glaucoma.")
Many languages have no word for 'blue'. In fact English didn't have a word for 'orange' until relatively recently. And it was invented to describe the color of those strange citrus fruits.
He’s wrong. There is and always has been a Welsh word for blue. It’s ‘glas’. There is no original word for green, which is why the modern Welsh word ‘gwyrdd’ is derived from Latin virdis. In Old Welsh ‘glas’ stood for both blue and green. This is why the north Wales word for grass is ‘glaswellt’ - literally ‘blue straw.’
@@MakerfieldConsort yes exactly. And also why a young man is called a ‘glas-lanc’ (literally a green boy - which has the same meaning as English ‘green’ = young inexperienced. The Welsh word for a university fresher is ‘glas fyfyriwr’ - a green student, for the same reason.
I love these compilations, but adore reading the comments! I either continue to learn something Quite Interesting, or almost pee myself giggling. Thanks one and all... 🥴👍🏻👏🏻
@@cookielfs That's actually very interesting because that would mean it would correspond to linguistic color theory assuming both words came from the same etymology.
But 'glas' can also mean green and grey. Therebare other words for both those colours, but no other word for blue. So correctly it could be said that there is no colour which mean just 'blue'.
To any Americans confused by Bill Bailey's "Bronze Movie" joke, 'Blue' is also British slang for matters related to sexual activity that some might consider offensive. Though I guess if you are watching panel shows on RU-vid, you might already know that.
IMO "blue movie" is a reasonably well-known phrase in the US. See also _The Simpsons_ when Krusty is thought to have died: Troy McClure: Well, that's the funeral, folks. We'll be sitting shivah at the friar's club at 7:00 and again at 10. You must be over 18 for the 10:00. It gets a little blue.
@@jb888888888 is it really? I had no idea. I had never heard that before I started watching QI & Would I Lie To You. I thought that was an exclusively British thing. Thanx for the polite heads up. A lot of people in RU-vid comment sections aren't as kind with their corrections.
@@JackDManheim I suppose it might be any number of factors. Some people know about X while others have never encountered it. Nobody knows every slang term about everything, you grok me?
Welsh word for blue is "Glas", pronounced in the same way you would pronounce "Glasses", just without the "es" bit at the end. There's also coch, which is red, melyn, which is yellow, porffor, which is purple, gwyrdd, which is green, du, which is black, gwyn, which is white, oren, which is orange, aur, which is gold, and pinc, which is exactly what you think it is.
Y'all must have an intern whose sole job is to come up with compilation ideas that could include what they say of the acropolis where the parthenon is.
And none of them, no... not even one of them, thought that Homer might have simply been describing the bronze colored sky at sunrise? OR considered that Homer suffered from color blindness? Since Homer also described honey as green, and wrote that sheep and the ocean were both the color of dark wine?
Actually there is a greek word with a silent π : Sappho (the greek poetress). The third letter is a π which is not pronounced (we pronounce instead the following letter, φ, as a /f/ sound)
It's the same as all the other examples Sandi gave. English speakers pronounce it /ˈsæfoʊ/ (Safo) but Greeks pronounce it Sap-pho [sap.pʰɔ̌ː]. Trust me, I'm Greek. And more specifically from the island of Lesvos, the birthplace of Sappho.
No Welsh word for blue? As someone who is Welsh and learned colours in Welsh in primary school I can confirm that there is in fact a word for blue 'glas' . I believe the confusion comes from what the ancient Welsh people considered as blue and what is green which was different to the English.
A lot of cultures used to use the same word for blue and green. Chinese used to do that as well. Having a separate word for blue and green is a more modern thing in a lot of languages. I never hear a very good reasoning behind it, besides "they just didn't feel like it needed a separate word" LOL!
Its not that the ancient Greeks didn't 'find a use for distinguishing blue'. That suggests that it's a conscious choice. It's the other way around: if they had a use for that distinction, a word would've emerged. And its possible that what they referred to as 'bronze' is also different to what we think of today. In any case, its the same in many earlier languages: distinction between blue and green comes later in a language's development.
It might sound to people that "didn't find a use" suggests a conscious choice, but I took it to mean that there was no necessity that arose to create that need. I think I recall that in Old Norse the language had a similar trait in that pale colours had one word, yet the same colours only darker had different words. For instance, pale colours such as yellow or red was called white, while a darker yellow or red was called red. I think they also called black "blue".
There's a nice video on that topic from Vox: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-gMqZR3pqMjg.html It has to do with how the society and civilisation develops.
@@likebot. the black/blue interchangeability is actually really common, same goes for green/blue (e.g Japanese). The word English used for black, initially, was what turned today into 'swart' (similar to German 'schwartz', and all other Germanic variants). Biblical Hebrew for example, doesn't differentiate red from brown.
The currently proposed explanation for the lack of a term for "blue" in early ancient Greece in linguistics is that languages evolve similarly when describing color and shades of them, so Ancient Greeks didn't distinguish green from blue but rather thought of them as different shades of the same color, same as with ancient Mexicas, more commonly known as "Aztecs", who didn't have a word for "blue" in Nahuatl, but they'd rather describe something as being "green" or "bright green", same as with Homer and "bronze", rather than describing the polished look of the unoxidized reddish orange metal hue, he was likely describing the vibrant green or aqua/turquoise hue of a weathered piece of bronze since there was no named distinction made in the spectrum of blue-turquoise-green colors.
Not really. The architectural technique called entasis that Stephen described was actually implemented in most other Doric temples of that age. It just happens to be very subtle on the Parthenon. If you google some of the ancient Greek temples of Magna Graecia (e.g. Agrigentum, Syracuse) you can see it very easily. The Greeks knew a lot about harmony and aesthetics (both Greek words btw). They even used the golden ratio on their temples (i.e. x number of columns on West and East side of temple and 2x+1 columns on North and South sides). In the Parthenon these numbers are 8 and 17.
You see this quite a lot in America, where many of the citizens are wider in the middle. Whether or not this actually does help them stand up more is open to debate. What is known, however, is that if this trend continues then America may well capsize.
About the german word for television Fernsehen or Fernseher for the TV-set, it's just a 1:1 translation of the word television, so it might have to be something else if the greeks didn't exist.
As Ronnie Barker was escorted into the hereafter by a quartet of choirboys each bearing a candle, so I imagine the memorial service for Stephen will, at some point, offer a rousing chorus of "They say of the Acropolis where the Parthenon is..."
Pink and orange are examples of colors that also much more recent, and that plenty of languages don't have words for. Pink is really just light red, and orange is a yellow-red. Sky blue is as distinct from dark blue as pink is from red, yet we don't think of it being a different color. But then some languages do think of it as a different color.
In all languages, Blue is one of the words that developed last, due to it being less common, and less easy to make. Red is ALWAYS first, mostly due to blood, and being easy to make
S.F. is like a teacher in a school for the gifted children of parents so immensely wealthy & powerful that he must put up with all of their clever insolence & reward all of their intelligent smartarsery.
4:00 The best part of this whole "we the Welsh" bit is that Alan ended up doing a dna heritage test and it turned out that - like almost everyone called Davis and unlike people called DaviEs - he has no Welsh heritage whatsoever
Stephen is actually wrong. There is a Welsh word for blue - it’s “glas”. Many years ago, “glas” meant both blue and green. To distinguish between them, green was changed to “gwyrdd”
Bronze oxide is, turquoise blue (Skyblue Green). Maybe this is why the sky was referred to as Bronze. In China they had no words for green & blue, those words were introduced after contact w/ the West. Prior to that time they used the word Qing (Ching) as in Qing Dao, which means Bluegreen. This worked for them, for many Asians are colorblind in that part of the spectrum. Blue = Lan suh, & Green = Loo suh in Chinese & even today the Japanese call the green traffic light; Ao = Blue ......
For those who wanna know what’s wrong with the Greek alphabet! Go to 16:24 of the link below for the whole clip. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-IBzBr9RqzCQ.html at 16:24 PS: wrong order, 2 times “χ”, 2 times “φ” one of them upper case, and a lower case omega(ω) with a line over it.
