Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (43 page)

1:
NAMING THE RAINBOW

“founded for the race”: Gladstone 1877, 388.

“the most extraordinary phenomenon”: Gladstone 1858, 1:13.

Gladstone’s view of Homer: Wemyss Reid 1899, 143.

“You are so absorbed in questions about Homer”: Myers 1958, 96.

The
Times
’s review of Gladstone: “Mr Gladstone’s Homeric Studies,” published on August 12, 1858.

“There are few public men in Europe”: John Stuart Blackie, reported in the
Times,
Nov. 8, 1858.

“statesman, orator, and scholar”: John Stuart Blackie,
Horae Hellenicae
(1874). E. A. W. Buchholz’s
Die Homerischen Realien
(1871) was dedicated to “dem eifrigen Pfleger und Förderer der Homerischen Forschung.”

“a little hobby-horsical”: Letter to the Duke of Argyll, May 28, 1863 (Tennyson 1897, 493).

“Mr. Gladstone may be a learned, enthusiastic”: John Stuart Blackie, reported in the
Times,
Nov. 8, 1858. On the reception of Gladstone’s Homeric studies, see Bebbington 2004.

“characteristic of the inability of the English”: Marx, letter to Engels, Aug. 13, 1858.

“I find in the plot of the
Iliad
”: Morley 1903, 544

page 28–29 Ilios, Wilusa, and the historical background of the
Iliad
: Latacz 2004; Finkelberg 2005.

Leto “represents the Blessed Virgin”: Gladstone 1858, 2:178; see also 2:153.

Gladstone’s originality: Previous scholars, from as early as Scaliger in 1577, had commented about the paucity of color descriptions in ancient writers (see Skard 1946, 166), but no one before Gladstone understood that the differences between us and the ancients went beyond occasional divergences in taste and fashion. In the eighteenth century, for example, Friedrich Wilhelm Doering wrote (1788, 88) that “it is clear that in ancient times both Greeks and Romans could do without many names of colors, from which a later era was in no way able to abstain, once the tools of luxury had grown infinitely. For
the austere simplicity of such unsophisticated men abhorred that great variety of colors used for garments and buildings, which in later times softer and more delicate men pursued with the greatest zeal.” (“Hoc autem primum satis constat antiquissimis temporibus cum graecos tum romanos multis colorum nominibus carere potuisse, quibus posterior aetas, luxuriae instumentis in infinitum auctis, nullo modo supersedere potuit. A multiplici enim et magna illa colorum in vestibus aedificiis et aliis operibus varietate, quam posthac summo studio sectati sunt molliores et delicatiores homines, abhorrebat austera rudium illorum hominum simplicitas.”) And in his
Farbenlehre
(1810, 54), Goethe explained about the ancients that “Ihre Farbenbenennungen sind nicht fix und genau bestimmt, sondern beweglich und schwankend, indem sie nach beiden Seiten auch von angrenzenden Farben gebraucht werden. Ihr Gelbes neigt sich einerseits ins Rote, andrerseits ins Blaue, das Blaue teils ins Grüne, teils ins Rote, das Rote bald ins Gelbe, bald ins Blaue; der Purpur schwebt auf der Grenze zwischen Rot und Blau und neigt sich bald zum Scharlach, bald zum Violetten. Indem die Alten auf diese Weise die Farbe als ein nicht nur an sich Bewegliches und Flüchtiges ansehen, sondern auch ein Vorgefühl der Steigerung und des Rückganges haben: so bedienen sie sich, wenn sie von den Farben reden, auch solcher Ausdrücke, welche diese Anschauung andeuten. Sie lassen das Gelbe röteln, weil es in seiner Steigerung zum Roten führt, oder das Rote gelbeln, indem es sich oft zu diesem seinen Ursprunge zurück neigt.”

sea red because of algae: Maxwell-Stuart 1981, 10.

“blue and violet reflects”: Christol 2002, 36.

“if any man should say”: Blackie 1866, 417.

“a born Chancellor of the Exchequer”: “Mr. Gladstone’s Homeric studies,”
Times
, Aug. 12, 1858.

Violet iron:
Iliad
23.850; violet wool:
Odyssey
9.426; violet sea:
Odyssey
5.56.

no one can be insensitive to the appeal of the colors: Goethe,
Beiträge zur Chromatik
.

“Homer had before him the most perfect example of blue”: Gladstone 1858, 3:483.

“As obliterating fire lights up”:
Iliad
2.455–80.

page 35 “their head aslant”:
Iliad
8.306.

“blackening beneath the ripple of the West Wind”:
Iliad
7.64.

“have been determined for us by Nature”: Gladstone 1858, 3:459.

“continued to be both faint and indefinite”: Gladstone 1858, 3:493.

“only after submitting the facts”: Gladstone 1877, 366.

“the organ of colour and its impressions”: Gladstone 1858, 3:488.

“the perceptions so easy and familiar to us”: Gladstone 1858, 3:496.

“The eye may require a familiarity”: Gladstone 1858, 3:488.

“The organ was given to Homer”: Gladstone 1877, 388.

Gladstone accurate and farsighted: On the modernity of Gladstone’s analysis, see also Lyons 1999.

2:
A LONG-WAVE HERRING

Geiger’s lecture: “Ueber den Farbensinn der Urzeit und seine Entwickelung” (Geiger 1878).

Geiger’s bold original theories: Many of these ideas, such as the discussion of the independent changes of sound and meaning, which anticipate Saussure’s arbitrariness of the sign, or the systematic discussion of semantic developments from concrete to abstract, are found in Geiger 1868 and the posthumous Geiger 1872. See also Morpurgo Davies 1998, 176, for Geiger’s ideas on accent in Indo-European. For assessments of Geiger’s life and work, see Peschier 1871, Keller 1883, Rosenthal 1884.

Geiger’s curiosity piqued by Gladstone’s discoveries: It seems, however, that Geiger misread one aspect of Gladstone’s analysis, since he seems to think (1878, 50) that Gladstone believed in the legend of Homer’s blindness, whereas, as we have seen, Gladstone explicitly argued against this legend.

“These hymns, of more than ten thousand”: Geiger 1878, 47.

Biblical Hebrew does not have a word for “blue”: As various scholars from Delitzsch (1878, 260; 1898, 756) onward as well as Geiger himself (1872, 318) have pointed out, there is one cryptic remark in the Old Testament, in Exodus 24:10 (also echoes in Ezekiel
1:26), that seems, at least indirectly, to relate the sky to lapis lazuli. In Exodus 24, Moses, Aaron, and seventy of the elders of Israel climb up Mount Sinai to see Yahweh: “And then they saw the God of Israel. Beneath his feet was something like a mosaic pavement of lapis lazuli, and like the very essence of the heavens as regards purity.” There are two descriptions of the “pavement” beneath God’s feet here: this surface is first said to have the appearance of a pattern of bricks of lapis lazuli, and secondly it is said to be pure “like the very essence of the heavens.” The sky itself is not
directly
compared to lapis lazuli, but it is hard to escape the impression that the two descriptions are based on a close association between the sky and this blue gemstone. On the interpretation of this passage, see Durham 2002, 344.

pages 44–45 Geiger quotes: 1878, 49, 57, 58.

Geiger’s confusions about black and white: Geiger may have assumed that black and white should be considered colors only if they have separate names from dark and bright. This may explain his obscure (and apparently conflicting) statements about the position of white with respect to red. In his lecture (1878, 57) he says: “Wei
ist in [den ächten Rigvedalieder] von roth noch kaum gesondert.” But in the table of contents for the second (unfinished and posthumously published) volume of his
Ursprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen Sprache und Vernunft
(1872, 245), he uses the opposite order: “Roth im Rigveda noch nicht bestimmt von wei
geschieden.” Unfortunately, the text of the unfinished volume stops before the relevant section, so it is impossible to ascertain what exactly Geiger meant on the subject of white.

Tantalizing hints in Geiger’s own notes: In
Der Urpsrung der Sprache
(1869, 242) he writes, “Da
es sich auf niedrigen Entwickelungsstufen noch bei heutigen Völkern ähnlich verhält, würde es leicht sein zu zeigen.” And in his posthumously published notes, he explicitly considers the possibility that language lags behind perception (1872, 317–18): “[Es] setzt sich eine ursprünglich aus völligem Nichtbemerken hervorgegangene Gleichgültigkeit gegen die Farbe des Himmels . . . fort. Der Himmel in diesen [Texten wird] nicht etwa schwarz im Sinne von blau genant, sonder seine Bläue [wird] gänzlich
verschwiegen, und ohne Zweifel geschieht dies weil dieselbe [die Bläue] nicht unmittelbar mit dem Dunkel verwechselt werden konnte. . . . Reizend ist es sodann, das Ringen eines unklaren, der Sprache und Vernunft überall um einige wenige Schritte vorauseilenden Gefühles zu beobachten, wie es . . . hie und da blo
zufällig einen mehr oder weniger nahe kommenden Ausdruck leiht.”

Lagerlunda crash: Olsén 2004, 127ff., Holmgren 1878, 19–22, but for a critical view see Frey 1975. The danger to the railways from color-blind personnel was pointed out twenty years earlier, by George Wilson (1855), a professor of technology at the University of Edinburgh, but his book does not seem to have had much impact.

Color blindness in the newspapers: E.g.,
New York Times
, “Color-blindness and its dangers” (July 8, 1878); “Color-blindness: How it endangers railroad travelers—some interesting experiments before a Massachusetts legislative committee” (Jan. 26, 1879); “Color-blindness of railroad men” (May 23, 1879); “Color-blind railroad men: A large percentage of defective vision in the employees of a Massachusetts road” (Aug. 17, 1879); “Color-blindness” (Aug. 17, 1879). See also Turner 1994, 177.

Magnus’s treatise: In fact, Magnus published two more or less identical monographs in the same year (1877a, 1877b), one of a more academic and the other of a more popular nature.