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# Were the Ancient Greeks colorblind?
- URL: https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/color-term-hierarchy/
- Published: 2026-04-07T09:00:18.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-03T15:38:33.000Z
- Description: Why Homer uses colors so strangely in the Iliad and the Odyssey
- Author: Daniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.
- Tags: Newsletter, color terms, Ancient Greek, human evolution, Homer, Vedic Sanskrit, Biblical Hebrew, Old Icelandic, Classical Arabic, scientific racism, evolutionary racism, Dani, Bambara, Hanunoo, Arrernte, Toba Batak, Beja, Bari, Malay, Russian, Hungarian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbo-Croatian, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics

> “There is only one thing that no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who did not already know it, and that is that the sky is blue.” \~ Lazarus Geiger

There’s something decidedly weird about the way Homer talks about colors in the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey*. Take one of his most famous—and odd—epithets: the “wine-dark sea”. Homer uses this phrase five times in the *Iliad* and twelve times in the *Odyssey*. The phrase is so ubiquitous that it is frequently used or alluded to in pop culture even today. But how does wine in any way accurately describe the color of the sea? Surely a comparison with something blue or green or even gray would have made for a better descriptor. Homer was writing in [Ancient Greek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient%5FGreek?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) (Indo-European > Hellenic), and in actuality, the phrase “wine-dark” is already a poetic reinterpretation of the word Homer actually used: οἶνοψ *oînops*, a compound of οἶνος *oînos* ‘wine’ + ὄψ *óps* ‘eye; face’, which would have more literally meant ‘wine-looking’. What about the sea is so wine-like that Homer uses the phrase not one but *seventeen* times to describe it?

It gets weirder: The only other thing Homer describes using the word *oînops* is… oxen. (Oxen are, for the record, black, brown, or reddish-brown.) Then there’s the term ἰόεις *ióeis* ‘violet’, which Homer uses to describe sheep (presumably black sheep), iron, and… the sea. So the sea is wine-looking and violet-like. Got it. Homer also compares the color of Odysseus’ dark hair to the color of a hyacinth, which, in case you didn’t know, looks like this:

![A closeup photograph of a vibrantly-colored violent hyacinth](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/2026/04/image.png)

I look forward to seeing Tom Holland with violet hair in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film **The Odyssey* ([Wikipedia: Hyacinth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyacinth?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com))

📘

Much of this article is based on the discussion of color terms in Guy Deutscher’s excellent book, **Through the language glass: Why the world looks different in other languages* ([Amazon](https://amzn.to/4hsH9tu?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) | [Bookshop](https://bookshop.org/a/110785/9780312610494?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com)). This also happens to be one of my favorite pop linguistics books. If you enjoy this article, I highly recommend procuring a copy at the links above.

![Book cover for “Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages” by Guy Deutscher. A white grid background with scattered colorful glass marbles; the title appears in large black and multicolored text, and the author’s name is at the bottom with “Picador” in the corner.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/2026/04/image-1.png)

[Amazon](https://amzn.to/4hsH9tu?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) | [Bookshop](https://bookshop.org/a/110785/9780312610494?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com)

This is just the beginning of Homer’s chromatic curiosities—oddities that have puzzled scholars for centuries. In 1858, for instance, British politician William Gladstone compiled a comprehensive list of Homer’s erratic use of colors as part of a massive 1,700-page treatise titled *Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age*. In a chapter tucked away near the end of the book titled “Homer’s perception and use of color”, Gladstone so thoroughly and rigorously documented Homer’s strange use of color terms that the intellectuals of the time were forced to acknowledge that something more was going on with Homer’s color vocabulary than mere poetic license. Gladstone carefully laid out five types of evidence showing that something was amiss in Homer’s descriptions of colors:

First, as we have already seen, Homer often uses the same word to denote colors that are—to modern observers, at least—completely different. Another example of this is his use of the word χλωρός *khlōrós*, which later just came to mean ‘green’. But Homer applies *khlōrós* to faces pale with fear, fresh twigs, the olive wood of the club of Cyclops, and… honey. Or take the word κυάνεος *kŭắneos*, which later came to mean ‘blue’. Homer employs it to describe the eyebrows of Zeus, the hair of Hector, and a dark cloud—never anything blue.

Second, Homer sometimes characterizes the same objects using contradictory color descriptors. Iron, for instance, is described using terms for violet and gray, as well as the word αἴθων *aíthōn* ‘a thing which blazes and flashes like burnished metal’. *aíthōn* is otherwise only used to refer to the color of horses, lions, and… oxen. So oxen are wine-looking and blazing like burnished metal. Cool.

Third, Homer uses color terms only sparingly, and not at all in places where we might confidently expect it. He never discusses the color of horses despite including extensive descriptions of them. He never describes the sky as blue; it is starry, broad, great, iron, or copper, but never blue. Poppies, spring flowers, fields of wheat, hills and forests are never described in terms of their colors. In contrast, the producers of the 1939 film *The Wonderful Wizard of Oz* specifically elected to use the scene involving a vibrant field of red and pink poppies to flaunt their dazzling new Technicolor technology. They used paper flowers to create the effect of a vast field, making it one of the most expensive and visually iconic sequences in movie history. Yet not once does Homer rely on the color of flowers for his vivid imagery.

Fourth, when colors do feature in the Homeric epics, white and black predominate over all other colors. The table below shows how often Homer uses each color term in the *Odyssey* and the *Iliad* combined:

| **Ancient Greek** | **Transliteration** | **English** | **Count** | **Notes**                                 |
| ----------------- | ------------------- | ----------- | --------- | ----------------------------------------- |
| μέλᾱς             | mélās               | black       | \~170     | Originally meant ‘dark’                   |
| various           | —                   | white       | \~100     |                                           |
| ἐρῠθρός           | erŭthrós            | red         | 13        |                                           |
| ξᾰνθός            | xănthós             | yellow      | 10        |                                           |
| ἰόεις             | ióeis               | violet      | 6         |                                           |
| χλωρός            | khlōrós             | green       | —         | Mostly used to describe non-green things. |
| κυάνεος           | kŭắneos             | blue        | —         | Never used to describe blue things.       |

Finally, as illustrated by the above table, the size of Homer’s color vocabulary is surprisingly small. There is a complete absence of any terms used to mean ‘blue’, ‘orange’, or ‘pink’, and *khlōrós* doesn’t appear to mean ‘green’ at this point.

Taken together, all the evidence points to something unquestionably strange about Homer’s use of color. What could possibly be the cause of his uneven, vague, and inconsistent color descriptions?

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## Why does Homer use colors so strangely?

> “If any man should say that the minstrel was deficient in the organ of colour because he designated the sea by this vague word, I would meet him by saying that the critic is deficient in the organ of poetry.” \~ John Stuart Blackie

Homer is often said to have been blind, and some have used this as an explanation for his odd use of color vocabulary, but his blindness is undoubtedly a myth. He may have been prismatically inept, but his visual descriptions are nonetheless vivid. Also, his contemporaries accepted his poetry unquestioningly! The Ancient Greeks found nothing wrong with his monochromatic portrayals of the world. In fact, we find traces of the same chromatic vagueness in other Ancient Greek writers: Pindar (5th C BCE), for example, also wrote about ‘violet-colored hair’.

Gladstone’s proposed explanation for the “faint and indefinite” color descriptions of the Ancient Greeks was that “the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age”. He argued that they saw the world primarily in terms of lightness and darkness rather than hue, save for a splash of red. The word *erŭthrós* ‘red’ was the only color term other than black and white that Homer used to refer *only* to reddish things (blood, wine, copper). Gladstone argued that the Greeks had been in effect colorblind—a claim made all the more remarkable by the fact that colorblindness was not yet known to the scholarly community in 1858\. The reason for this colorblindness, he claimed, was that the Greeks had at the time only just begun to develop artificial dyes. It is only once people are exposed to artificial colors that they evolved the ability to see colors and subsequently name them.

Put differently, **the Greeks had not yet conceived of color as an abstract concept**, independent of the objects bearing those colors. This isn’t as strange a claim as it might sound: in a similar fashion, it took ancient Sumerians several centuries to conceive of numbers as abstract concepts. Prior to the standardization of their counting system, the Sumerians had different sets of numbers for different commodities. A separate series of numerals was used to count barley and cereal products, malt, barley groats, land area, and calendar time, among others. From today’s standpoint, this proliferation of counting systems seems like an unnecessarily complex deficiency. But given that the primary function of these numeral systems was to tally commodities, having distinct numerals that told you something about *which* commodity was being counted would have been incredibly useful. This meant, however, that numbers were always tied to the specific concrete entities being counted. It took centuries for the Sumerians to conceptualize numerals in the abstract, and when they did the result was the incredibly sophisticated mathematical tradition of the Babylonians.

🌠

**If you want to learn more about Sumerian numerals and how they gave rise to the world’s first writing system, cuneiform, check out this free issue of the Linguistic Discovery newsletter:*

[From counting to cuneiform: How writing was inventedThe earliest version of cuneiform wasn’t used to write language at all—it was used to count! And that Sumerian system of counting still influences our counting systems today. Here’s the story of Sumerian numerals.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/icon/languages-bordered-125.png)Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/thumbnail/proto-cuneiform-accounting-tablet-4.png)](https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/sumerian-numerals/)

Gladstone’s thesis also has some explanatory power. Ignoring Gladstone’s proposed evolutionary mechanism for a moment, if we interpret Homer’s depictions in terms of shades of darkness rather than hue, phrases like ‘violet sheep’ and ‘wine-dark sea’ no longer seem so strange. This hypothesis also explains the total absence of blue: it appears that for Homer, *kŭắneos* simply referred to any dark color, rather than ‘blue’ specifically. And the use of *khlōrós* to describe non-green things suddenly makes sense when we realize that its original meaning was ‘young herbage’. As such, it could be used to describe anything fresh, verdant, unripe, or pale—including honey and fearful faces.

But from our modern vantage point, Gladstone’s explanation for *why* the Ancient Greeks focused on lightness vs. darkness rather than hue seems scientifically antiquated. 2,500 years is not enough time for evolutionary forces to exert sufficient selective pressure on a population that they develop the complexities of color vision. To be fair, however, Gladstone’s *magnum opus* was published just a few months before Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace jointly announced a theory of evolution by natural selection in 1858\. The prevailing explanation for biological change at the time was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s model of inheritance of acquired characteristics. In this view, traits that an organism acquires during its lifetime can be passed on to their offspring. Early giraffes strained to reach the high boughs of a tree, and so their offspring developed long necks. A blacksmith might get strong muscles from their work, and their children would then be stronger as a result.

Thus, to the scholars of the time, an explanation of the Ancient Greeks’ color deficiencies in terms of inheritance of acquired characteristics made perfect sense. The Greeks, it was argued, hadn’t yet developed color terms because they simply didn’t have need of them yet. Once they developed artificial paints and dyes, the Greeks became like those giraffes reaching for the highest leaves, and slowly got better at distinguishing the hues of the rainbow.

Nonetheless, Gladstone’s contemporaries were no less harsh in their reception of his ideas. Prominent classicist John Stuart Blackie trenchantly wrote:

> If any man should say that the minstrel was deficient in the organ of colour because he designated the sea by this vague word, I would meet him by saying that the critic is deficient in the organ of poetry.

Yet Gladstone’s thesis turned out to be prescient. Although he misunderstood the mechanism, he was ultimately correct that the color vocabulary of the Greek language—and indeed *all* languages—shifted its focus over time from shades of darkness to hue. Today we know that Gladstone’s findings actually reflect a universal tendency in how the world’s languages develop color terms over time, and that this **color term hierarchy**, as it is called, arises due to subtle biological influences on language. In the remainder of this article, I’ll explain what the color term hierarchy is, what causes it, and how it’s realized in the world’s languages.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/2026/04/image-2.png)

The color term hierarchy (based on Berlin & Kay 1969)

## The color term hierarchy

In the century following Gladstone’s seminal work, scholars came to realize that the Ancient Greeks were not the only ones who were chromatically challenged. About a decade after Gladstone’s *Studies on Homer*, philologist Lazaraus Geiger gave a plenary lecture at the 1867 Assembly of German Naturalists & Physicians titled “On the Color Sense in Primitive Times and its Evolution”, in which he expanded on Gladstone’s work. He realized that it was not just Homer who struggled with colors, but the authors of *all* the ancient texts—the Indian Vedic poems ([Vedic Sanskrit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic%5FSanskrit?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com): Indo-European), the Old Testament ([Biblical Hebrew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical%5FHebrew?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com): Semitic), the Icelandic sagas ([Old Icelandic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old%5FNorse?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com#Old%5FIcelandic): Indo-European > Germanic), and even the Quran ([Classical Arabic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical%5FArabic?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com): Semitic). Biblical Hebrew, for instance, lacks a word for ‘blue’, and the Bible is rife with odd color descriptions: a ‘red horse’ and a ‘red heifer without spot’; faces ‘turned green’ with panic; the feathers of a dove covered with ‘green gold’. As for the Vedic hymns, Geiger says:

> These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn’s play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and the ether, all these are unfolded before us over and over again, in splendor and vivid fullness. But there is only one thing that no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who did not already know it, and that is that the sky is blue.

Geiger bolsters his case further with etymology: when you examine the history of color terms in modern European languages, it becomes apparent that words for ‘blue’ are a recent development—they derive either from an earlier word meaning ‘green’ or one that meant ‘black’. Similarly, while words for ‘green’ extend further back in time than ones for ‘blue’, they too disappear, suggesting an earlier stage when green was not yet distinguished from yellow. ‘yellow’, too, appears to have derived from words originally referring to red. Even red, the one color Homer circumscribed distinct from black and white, could be traced back to a generic term meaning ‘something colored’, he argued. The result was a timeline of the development of color terms **that holds across languages** that looks like this:

black/white → red → yellow → green → blue → violet

The subsequent several decades of research vindicated Geiger’s proposal. As scholars investigated indigenous languages from around the globe, they found increasingly more cases of languages lacking words for ‘blue’, or ones that only had terms for ‘black’, ‘white’, and ‘red’, or that conflated ‘yellow’ and ‘green’, and so on.

Then, due to a general shift in the zeitgeist of the early 1900s, Geiger’s work and that of his successors was ignored and forgotten. The reason for this is that Geiger’s evolutionary timeline was too suggestive of **evolutionary racism**, the idea that primitive peoples are biologically inferior to more civilized ones. Thanks in part to anthropologist Franz Boas, this type of scientific racism was falling out of favor. Boas and others argued cogently that differences in human behavior are merely the result of cultural differences and social learning, not biological disparities, and that all humans therefore possess the same cognitive capacities. In light of this intellectual shift, it was easy to construe Geiger’s evolutionary color sequence as claiming that some peoples were less evolved than others. And so scholars ignored it.

That is, until Geiger’s findings were independently rediscovered by anthropologist Brent Berlin and linguist Paul Kay and published in their now-famous 1969 book, *Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution*. Using a set of colored chips, Berlin & Kay collected names for colors from speakers of twenty different languages, and in doing so uncovered a pattern almost identical to that proposed by Geiger a century earlier. They found that some languages only had color terms for light vs. dark. If a language had a third color, it was red, and if it had a fourth, it was either yellow or green. The fifth color to emerge is then whichever didn’t emerge in the previous stage: yellow or green. (The difference depends on whether the language originally considered yellow to be a shade of green \[uncommon\], or green a shade of yellow \[common\].) At this point, blue is still considered by most languages to be a shade of green.

Blue is the last color to emerge in a fixed order; after that, any of the colors brown, purple, pink, orange, or gray can appear. (Berlin & Kay actually originally included a separate stage for brown immediately after blue, but subsequent research showed this separate stage to be unnecessary/untenable.) Some languages develop even more color distinctions after this, contrasting light vs. dark hues of blue or red. Below is the color term hierarchy as first proposed in 1969 (less a distinct stage for brown).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/2026/04/image-2.png)

The color term hierarchy (based on Berlin & Kay 1969)

This model would be amended—and exceptions found—in the years to come as data from more languages became available, but the overall pattern holds for the vast majority of languages whose color systems have been studied. Below are examples of languages at each stage, taken from Berlin & Kay’s study and using their transcriptions.

- **Stage I (black + white):** [**Dani**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand%5FValley%5FDani?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) (Trans–New Guinea)
  - *mili*: cool/dark shades such as blue, green, and black
  - *mola*: warm/light colors such as red, yellow, and white
- **Stage II (+red):** [**Bambara**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambara%5Flanguage?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) (Mande)
  - *fima*: dark green, indigo, and black
  - *dyema*: white, beige
  - *blema*: reddish, brownish
- **Stage IIIa (+green):** [**Hanunoo**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanunoo%5Flanguage?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) (Austronesian > Malayo-Polynesian > Philippine)
  - *biru*: black, violet, indigo, blue, dark green, dark gray, and deep shades of other colors
  - *lagtiʔ*: white, light tints of other colors
  - *raraʔ*: maroon, red, orange, yellow
  - *latuy*: green, mixtures of green, yellow and light brown
- **Stage IIIb (+yellow):** [**Arrernte**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrernte%5Flanguage?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) (Pama–Nyungan)
  - *urapulla*: black
  - *churunkura*: white
  - *tutuka*: red
  - *tierga*: yellow, green, blue
- **Stage IV (yellow + green):** [**Toba Batak**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba%5FBatak%5Flanguage?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) (Austronesian > Malayo-Polynesian)
  - *birong, agong*: black
  - *bontar, bottar*: white
  - *rara, gara, bara*: red
  - *hoenik, koening*: yellow, orange, brown
  - *rata*: green, blue
- **Stage V (+blue):** [**Beja**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beja%5Flanguage?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) (Cushitic)
  - *hadā́l*: black, blue
  - *era*: white
  - *adaro*: red
  - *asfar*: yellow
  - *sṓtay*: green, brown
  - *delī́f*: blue, brown
- **Stage VI (+brown):** [**Bari**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari%5Flanguage?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) (Eastern Sudanic) *(Originally hypothesized as a distinct stage.)*
  - *lurnö*: black
  - *lo’kwe*: white, pure, holy
  - *lo’tor*: red, reddish
  - *lo’forong*: yellow
  - *ló‑ngem*: green
  - *murye*: blue
  - *lo’jere*: brown
- **Stage VI (+other):** [**Malay**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay%5Flanguage?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) (Austronesian > Malayo-Polynesian)
  - *itam*: black
  - *poetih, putih*: white
  - *merah*: red
  - *koening*: yellow
  - *idjo*: green
  - *biroe*: blue
  - *tjokolat*: brown
  - *oengoe, ongo*: violet
  - *djinggo*: orange
  - *kelaboe*: gray
- **Stage VII (+light/dark hues)**
  - [**Russian**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian%5Flanguage?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) **(Indo-European > Slavic):** синий *siniy* ‘dark blue’ vs. голубой *goluboy* ‘light blue’
  - [**Hungarian**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian%5Flanguage?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) **(Uralic > Ugric):** *piros* ‘light red’ vs. *vörös* ‘dark red’
  - [**Scottish Gaelic**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish%5FGaelic?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) **(Indo-European > Celtic):** *dearg* ‘light/bright red’ vs. *rua*/*ruadh* ‘dark/brownish red’

I also discovered while researching this article that [Serbo-Croatian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) (Indo-European > Slavic) has an especially rich color lexicon:

> There are differences in dark brown (*mrk*), brown (*smeđ* and *kestenjast*), red (*crven*), pink (*ružičast*), and orange (*narandžast*), as well as in blue hues: navy blue (*teget*), dark blue (*modar*), blue (*plav*), and ash blue (*sinj*). ([Wikipedia: Color term](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color%5Fterm?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com#Stage%5FVII+))

It’s important to note that the color term hierarchy is a *tendency* only, albeit an incredibly robust one. It should not be taken as categorical. Nonetheless, the similarities in color vocabulary across languages are far too consistent to be mere accident. The overwhelming majority of languages develop color terms in predictable ways over time.

## Hidden color universals

Berlin & Kay took their investigation one step further: even though languages can cut up the color spectrum in myriad ways, there was a shocking level of agreement across speakers of all languages on precisely which hue constituted the *best* exemplar of a color. Take [Tzeltal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzeltal%5Flanguage?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com), a Mayan language spoken in Mexico, as an example: The language has a term *yaš* that covers both green and blue (often referred to when describing languages like this as ‘grue’). When Berlin & Kay asked Tzeltal speakers to choose the best example of *yaš*, they didn’t pick a shade of turquoise right in the middle of grue, halfway between green and blue, as you might expect. Instead, the majority chose a strongly green shade, while a minority chose a strongly blue shade. None chose a shade of turquoise. In language after language, no matter where the language’s vocabulary drew the lines between colors, speakers chose roughly the same hues as the best exemplars (foci) of whatever color term they happened to be a part of. You can think of these exemplars as the most “prototypical” shade of each color. The results of Berlin & Kay’s foci experiment are shown in the following graph.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/2026/04/image-3.png)

Wavelengths of samples chosen by informants that “best” correspond with each of twenty languages’ primary color terms (Deacon 1997: 118, discussing Berlin & Kay 1969)

This finding suggests that there is indeed something objective or universal about the organization of color terms in human language, something which, Berlin & Kay speculated, must be rooted in the biology of human vision. Though many of their other additions and changes to Geiger’s original sequence turned out to be unfounded, and the exact foci of different color terms were more dispersed than originally thought, Berlin & Kay were nonetheless largely right in this regard. If you compare the color term foci in the above graph to the graph of the responsiveness of neurons to different frequencies of light below, you can see there is a strong correlation.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/2026/04/image-4.png)

Responsiveness of neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus (LGN), the first central nervous system relay for visual inputs, in response to different wavelengths of light (Deacon 1997: 188)

The explanation for crosslinguistic agreement about color prototypes is that human biology nudges us towards certain groupings of colors because our sensitivity to light is greater in certain wavelengths than others. And though it is possible to overcome these biological pressures—as evidenced by languages which deviate from the hierarchy in miscellaneous ways—the accumulated effects of those pressures applied over many generations of speakers all but ensure that languages will group colors in similar ways.

The explanation for the *order* of colors in the hierarchy, however, probably has more to do with culture than biology:

- **Red** is a salient color even in the simplest of societies because red is the color of blood. (In fact, the word for ‘red’ in many languages actually derives from the word for ‘blood’. The Hebrew name *Adam*, for example, derives from the Semitic word *adam* ‘red’, which itself comes from Proto-Semitic \* *dam‑* ‘blood’. The Bible states that Adam is named for the soil, *adamah*, but that term refers specifically to red soil, and is also derived from *adam* ‘red’.) Red dyes are also the most common and easiest to create. Many cultures have only black, white, and red dyes. One such example is the Chitimacha tribe of Louisiana, whose stunning cane reed baskets were traditionally made using just black and red dyes.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/2026/04/image-5.png)

A traditional-style Chitimacha basket using only plain undyed cane or cane dyed black or red. (Photo: Daniel Hieber)

[Renaissance on the bayou: Revitalizing the Chitimacha languageThe Chitimacha language was once thought to be extinct, but today is undergoing a renaissance as young people learn the language again.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/icon/languages-bordered-126.png)Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/thumbnail/banner-1-11.png)](https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/renaissance-on-the-bayou/)

- **Yellow** and **green** are the next most salient colors because humans have evolved to distinguish them in order to spot ripe fruit against a green forest background. These colors are also brighter than blue and occur frequently in nature. Societies which constantly interact with a variety of plants will need these color distinctions.
- By contrast, **blue** is extremely rare in the natural materials that hunter-forager or simple farming societies might interact with. Yes, the sky is blue, of course, but that has no practical consequences for humans most of the time. And even when a community does have need for a word describing blue, it is usually because of a single specific material in the area like lapis lazuli (which eventually [gave us the color term *azure*](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/azure?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com)). It is not until communities learn to develop artificial dyes and paints that speakers need to start describing *many* types of blue things, and the abstract color concept becomes useful.

It would seem, in the end, that Gladstone was partly right all along: the Ancient Greeks lacked color terms because they had yet to develop a society which needed them. Colors for the Ancient Greeks were still strongly tied to the specific natural objects which exhibited those colors. Homer’s (non-)use of color terms is a reflection of the world at the time and place in which he lived, a world which had little need for the variegated color lexicon we use today.

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## 📑 Bibliography

- Berlin, Brent & Paul Kay. 1969\. *Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution*. University of California Press.
- Deacon, Terrence W. 1997\. *The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain*. W. W. Norton & Co.
- Deutscher, Guy. 2010\. *Through the language glass: Why the world looks different in other languages*. Picador.
- Geiger, Lazarus. 1880\. *Contributions to the history and development of the human race: Lectures and dissertations by Lazarus Geiger* (The English and Foreign Philosophical Library 20). (Trans.) David Asher. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.
- Gladstone, William E. 1858\. *Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age*. Oxford University Press.

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