The sea was never blue

[Igel]

4. There's a huge linguistic and cog sci literature on color naming systems.

Some languages have reduced (or unelaborated) color systems. Perhaps just "dark" and "bright" (often translated "black" and "white&quot .

A quick search turned up https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1113347109; I don't know that I agree with the conclusion (not having read the details or thought about it), but it points to the utter banality of awareness of the problem and hints at the complexity of approaches to it over the last 50 years or more.

I think it's usually red that's added next, with blue not far behind. Not my shtick. But systems that have different words for two blues aren't *that* rare (Russian is like that, for instance, with "sinii" and "goluboi&quot .

"Orange" is much more rare. We got it from the name of the fruit when the fruit was introduced. Prior to that the word was either "yellow" or "red" or, if precision was needed, something like "yellowish red." Even "brown" just meant "dark" in Chaucer's day, if I remember a-right.

Really elaborate systems that include terms like "turquoise, teal, mauve, pink, magenta" are off-the-wall exceptional cross-linguistically and historically.

Using Homer as a language source is risky in many ways. For etymologies, sure--he uses the word, it's a word. But poetic language tends to be heavily stylized, sometimes pushing the boundaries or trying to provoke a kind of alienation from the accustomed so as it make it seem strange and worthy of attention. Just consider Olesha's "Envy" (Зависть) for an example; F. Sologub is also pretty good at that in his own stranger way. (There's a wealth of scholarship on this, too, mostly dating prior to po-mo domination and colonization/extirpation of most other approaches to understanding literatures or in outlying territories that resisted annexation and assimilation.)

Then there are the unnamed colors, "impossible colors," that are always amusing to point out after I point out to my students that colors like "pink" and "brown" are not rainbow colors.