Right chaps that’s it we can go home we’ve used up the internet.
Like this is what depresses me the most with the Euro match, because the England team is full of good, decent people who have been actively promoting progressivism both on and off the pitch, notably taking the knee before matches and wearing rainbow laces and armbands, as well as in the case of Marcus Rashford in particular actively challenging the government’s abysmal support for people in poverty during the pandemic. This team is a representation of what the UK should aspire to be.
But of course outside of the UK that doesn’t come across. All that foreigners see is the jingoistic nationalism, not just from the so-called ‘fans’ who not only boo other teams’ national anthems and players but even their own when they aren’t absolutely perfect (especially the black players), but also our own government, who was not reluctant to condemn this awful behaviour when it happened but also is complicit in stoking it in the first place through Brexit and more general culture-warfare and flag-shagging.
The team deserved a shot at winning. The country, and more particularly the government, didn’t.
Mark Kelly and Kristen Sinema are both directly referenced by him. For fuck's sake.
Blue dogs can go straight to hell
It is fucking nuts to me that Qanon idiots will spend all day blogging about secret illuminati groups using warlocks to control government meanwhile oil executives admit to rigging politics on TV while naming their corrupt toadies and nobody bats a fucking eye.
New kind of guy
... I kinda think this person has a point @normal-horoscopes. Like, we are looking at this oil scandal aren't we? We're paying attention. I mean the idea that all bad news that isn't already having resolution is useless is kinda extreme but the idea that nobody is paying attention is kinda doomy given that like.... look, here it is, we found out about it, we're talking about it, and god willing we're gonna do something about it right?
No it didnt mean Greeks couldn’t see blue Reddit cunt it means he said the sea was dark like wine because you know what the sea looks like sometimes? wine daft cunt
No no no, no (you’ve activated my artist and my armchair linguist/historian)
The concept of Mass Greecian Colorblindness was a theory proposed in 1858 for why the Wine Dark Sea line exists in the Oddessy. The theorist in question (Gladstone) went through the Oddessy and had translation issues because Homer used colors weird. Sheep and oxen are described as violet, honey was green, and if you branch outside of Homer there’s things like “violet hair” in contemporary greek texts. It’s weird, so Gladstone’s hypothesis was that the entirety of Greece was colorblind, and the ability to see color rapidly developed between then and the modern day with each generation seeing more colors.
Which is wrong. All current evidence says humanity’s colorsight goes back millions of years prior.
But it did highlight a linguistics phenomena - there was no word for blue in the language at the time (white + black occur in the texts, red occurs fewer times, yellow even fewer, then green, and no blue). This is not a phenomena that is unique to Ancient Greek, it exists in ancient Hebrew as well as the Icelandic Sagas, Vedic hymns, and Ancient Chineese. Contemporary descriptions of the sky (in ancient Greek) would call it white.
The words for white and black are the oldest in every language (light and dark, day and night) and then red starts cropping up (blood, ripe fruit). Yellow, green, etc show up next in variable order, and blue is almost always the last color to be invented as a linguistic concept, because it doesn’t show up that often in nature. There aren’t a lot of blue flowers, or animals, the sky isn’t consistently blue and neither is the sea, and blue eyes are a rare trait in most parts of the world.
There’s a fellow named Guy Deutscher who ran an experiment with his daughter a few years ago (you can listen to him talking about it here)
- he never told her what color the sky was. He and his wife gave her all the
words for the different colors, including blue, and for months she
couldn’t tell him what color the sky was. When she finally had an
answer, she said the sky was white. And she maintained that for months,
until gradually she started answering “blue” more and more often.
Humans need regular exposure to a color and then to be told that the color is it’s own concept before it sinks in as a separate category. There’s another experiment that was performed with a South American tribe, the Tsimane’ that showed the same effect - if a culture doesn’t need to identify the color often we have a harder time separating it out into its own category.
It’s not that people couldn’t see the color, it’s that… look orange and brown are the same damn color, okay? Brown is just dark orange, that is all it is, there’s a really nice breakdown of that in this video - we just *perceive* it to be something entirely separate because that’s how we’re taught to think of it. Brown is different than orange, pink is different from red. Russian has two words for blue (goluboy, a light blue and sinii, a very dark blue) and they are separate concepts which means Russians tend to be quicker at sorting shades of blue.
Language gives our brains a different box to put the color into so we see it and perceive it differently because we know to pay attention to it. But cultures don’t make up the words for a new color until there’s a reason to.
This is also one of the things you have to adapt to when you’re learning to paint, because we’re trained that trees are “green” and the sun is “yellow” and apples are “red” and water is “blue” and skin is “white” and “black” and “brown”. And the colors that things actually are is more complicated, it’s based in where the light is and the relationships between the hues you’re seeing.
holy shit
What interesting is how this also lines up with how children develop a concept of colour as they grow up. Even if they are told things like “the sky is blue”
Infants respond best to black and white and as they get older they can take in the different colour variations but it follows the same linguistics pattern that languages do with blue being one of the last colours that kids get a handle on at about 4
Which makes it very challenging to figure out that your kid is actually colourblind
Kiddo is red/green colourblind but you can’t really pin that down as a thing before the age of 4
The Greeks did have a name for the color blue, though - it's κύανος (kyanos); “cyan” is derived from it. People (including some classicists, which I don’t really get) get very hung up on the literal meanings of Greek color words, but as my esteemed colleague, um, nutsacktorturer points out, the Mediterranean does look almost purple under some light; “χλωρός” (chloros, like chlorophyll), which literally means “green” is often used for “young” or “inexperienced” – a use that’s still common in English.
It’s easy to forget that most of the sources we have color words in are literary (there’s not much cause to say that the defendant was wearing a blue tunic in an ancient court case, for example) and therefore often use the color words for their metaphorical meanings rather than for their literal meanings.
In short, it’s not that the Greeks “didn’t have” a word for blue (they had at least two), it’s that Greek literary tradition uses blue in a way that’s slightly unexpected.
Classical Chinese does have a word for (indigo) blue. It’s lan 藍. If greenish blue it’s qing 青. Unless I’m missing some linguistically profound truth?
Happy to be corrected by a native speaker!
Well, Ancient China and Classical China are a pretty long way apart in absolute time, as are Classical Greece and Homeric Greece, so both sets of assertions could easily be true.
Okay, I do comparative analysis of historical languages, and colours are one of the subjects I get excited about. I don’t have details on Greek colour terms, but I do for Chinese, as well as more general trends.
-
Colour words frequently don’t start out as colour words. And even after becoming colour words, many still do double duty as terms for things that happen to be that colour.
Think of English. We have a lot of colour words derived from flowers, plants, foods, gems, and dyes. Violet, pink, periwinkle, rose, lavender - are all
flower names.
Chestnut, mahogany, grass - plants. Orange, cocoa, almond - food. Jade, aquamarine, emerald - gems.
Indigo, umber (burnt or raw), vermillion - dyes. They were originally used in comparisons - “violet eyes” are eyes that
are the same colour as violet flowers. “Emerald robes” have been dyed a
colour that reminds you of emerald stones. A “wine-dark sea” is an ocean
that looks the same colour as wine in that particular light.
So, a LOT of languages didn’t have a specific term for blue, historically. (Or orange. Or purple.) Most DID have words for specific things that happened to be blue.
The Chinese and Maya both have terms for, and dyed things with, indigo, without frequently using the term for non-indigo blue objects. They had colour words for blue-green, and if they needed to be more specific, could compare whatever they were talking about to a specific thing that was the same shade.
When we’re talking about how many ‘colours’ a language has, we’re usually discussing how the language groups colours. Almost any language can describe a specific shade by comparing it to something else. But asked to group various shades together, how many groups are they going to make?
Modern Mandarin speakers probably group ‘blue’ objects in a separate category from ‘green’ objects.¹ Contact with the West, and Western insistence that those are different categories, influenced the adoption of ‘lan’
藍
as separate from 'lü’
綠.
That doesn’t mean that Ancient Chinese speakers couldn’t see the difference between the colour of a blueberry and a grape. English speakers can see the difference between a pine tree and a mint plant. But if we were asked to choose all the 'green’ objects in a group, we’d pick both of them. In Ancient China, if someone was asked to find all the 'lü’ objects, they might pick both the blueberry and the grape.²
-
¹ I’m not a hundred percent sure, since I don’t look at modern languages much.
² Or, more probably, they’d think the blueberry was 'hei’
黑/'black.’ I need to think of a lighter blue example.
“Two dumbasses and the voice of reason” is a fun relationship dynamic, but also consider:
It’s always fun to see a version of one of my own posts cross my dash uncredited.
The Welsh Government have recently announced that to apply for a job with them soon you will have to demonstrate a ‘courtesy level’ of Welsh. And ooooh boy are the bitter trolls angry about this!
So let’s take a little look shall we? Dewch ymlaen pawb. (come on everyone.)
Firstly what on earth is a courtesy level of Welsh? Well-
So answering the phone bilingually ‘Bore Da-Good Morning’, ‘Prynhawn Da- Good afternoon’ and this is really wild but you can use those same words on speaking to a real life person too 🤯
Interpreting short texts sounds hard? Yes but you can use the provided technology to help you.
What if I am the best person for the job, it’s my ideal job but I don’t speak Welsh? Well my friend….
AND
Courses for staff will be free to staff. Often provided during the working day. And you have six months to show you are willing to learn. Six months….
Look, sarcasm aside Welsh is an official living language of Wales. We use it daily. We tell jokes, we fall in love, we complain through Welsh. My mother didn’t (couldn’t) speak English till she was 8. I didn’t speak English till I was 3…. There is a Welsh Language TV Chanel. You may have heard of some of the actors Matthew Rhys, Ioan Gruffudd, Alexander Vlahos or Iwan Rheon- all Welsh speakers- all been on S4C.
All Welsh speakers speak English though. Yes, yes we do- two languages in one head-aren’t we clever 🤷🏻♀️ just because we can doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have the choice. The Welsh language (Cymraeg) is alive because people fought for it…and the fight goes on. But because we’re this tiny little country who also speak English it’s a ‘dead’ I.e not important language. Fuck Off!
What about immigrants?- you know buddy immigrants have more than one language themselves- usually several and have proven themselves by learning Welsh.
What about Welsh people who don’t want to learn Welsh though? Um, not answering that one!
The Welsh Government are the Government of a country with two official languages- asking for a courtesy level of one of those two languages is as it should be.
Diolch.
watching doctor who is like,, yes i can believe this welsh quarry is an alien planet no i cannot believe donna noble would say flip instead of fuck
petition to make Americans google “euro” before writing fic
True europeans can roll their Euros and always carry an emergency hammer with them to do so
