Color vs Black and White, the eternal debate

[baachitraka]

colour = full colour (what ever that means)

color = missing one hue.

*I know, I am wasting everyone's time

 

[nikos79]

colour = full colour (what ever that means)

color = missing one hue.

*I know, I am wasting everyone's time

In ancient Greek it was χρώμα (chroma)
It is very interesting that ancient Greeks were almost blind to pale blue or green. Many theories have emerged about it. Perhaps I have inherited that too

Also in Homer and other works the sea was never being described as blue. Many other colors that i think go mostly towards black but never blue

 

[Don_ih]

I have no idea what that means

Someone could very easily and at any time go take a thousand digital photos that are only about colour. I just used my phone to take this:

The next step in the argument will be to say, "That's not a photograph."

 

[nikos79]

Someone could very easily and at any time go take a thousand digital photos that are only about colour. I just used my phone to take this:

View attachment 405061

The next step in the argument will be to say, "That's not a photograph."

No-one said it is not a photograph.
I can also post my chest x-ray image too, that is a photo as well.

 

[Don_ih]

I can also post my chest x-ray image too, that is a photo as well.

It is. But I get the distinct feeling that you would not have much to say about a photo unless it was a photo of something (where you could actually just talk about that something).

 

[koraks]

It is very interesting that ancient Greeks were almost blind to pale blue or green.

Nonsense. You're confusing the linguistic identification hues with the ability to discern them biologically/physically. On both topics lits of research has been done, but they're distinct topics. You can't drive a physical ability or lack thereof from a linguistic artifact.

 

[baachitraka]

politeness is missing few hues :-(

 

[nikos79]

Nonsense. You're confusing the linguistic identification hues with the ability to discern them biologically/physically. On both topics lits of research has been done, but they're distinct topics. You can't drive a physical ability or lack thereof from a linguistic artifact.

Yes of course, human biology hasn't changed in the past 10 thousand years, but the linguistically perception might also affect the way we perceive art.
I think colour in Ancient Greece was mostly about intensity and texture and less about hue, that is why the sky is bronze and eyes bright and sea turbulent wine red

 

[pentaxuser]

It is very interesting that ancient Greeks were almost blind to pale blue or green.

Interesting. Can you give the source or sources of this apparent fact. So were the whole race of ancient Greeks blind to pale blue or green? Assuming modern Greeks are not afflicted by this flaw was this a gradual change and if so, from when( what date) is it agreed that Greeks were free of the flaw?

Thanks

pentaxuser

 

[koraks]

Yes of course, human biology hasn't changed in the past 10 thousand years, but the linguistically perception might also affect the way we perceive art.

Now you make this about something else than your initial statement. Exchanges with you seem to follow this pattern a lot. You say something, someone suggests it's not accurate, so you say they're right and change the topic to something related. It's a bit like wrestling an eel.

 

[nikos79]

Now you make this about something else than your initial statement. Exchanges with you seem to follow this pattern a lot. You say something, someone suggests it's not accurate, so you say they're right and change the topic to something related. It's a bit like wrestling an eel.

I think this is normal progress of conversation, I say something perhaps a bit exaggerated, you question it, I check my sources, reformulate and come back with a more accurate statement

P.S. I laughed a lot with the eel analogy

 

[nikos79]

Interesting. Can you give the source or sources of this apparent fact. So were the whole race of ancient Greeks blind to pale blue or green? Assuming modern Greeks are not afflicted by this flaw was this a gradual change and if so, from when( what date) is it agreed that Greeks were free of the flaw?

Thanks

pentaxuser

I will give some sources yes but colour blind was a bit figuratively speaking. Here is some sources. although very off topic:

---

The Ancient Greeks Were Almost Blind to Blue and Green

There is a possibility that the ancients, by their very nature — purely at the level of the retina — saw fewer colors than our eyes see today, to the point that one could even speak of a “Greek blindness.”

“How differently from us the Greeks must have seen nature, since we can hardly deny that they were almost blind to blue and green — seeing instead of the first a darker brown, and instead of the second a yellow. (Thus they used the same word, for example, to describe the color of chestnut hair, the centaury flower, and the southern sea; and with the same word, the color of lush green plants and human skin, of honey and yellow resin.)

According to the evidence, then, their greatest painters depicted their world using only black, white, red, and yellow. How different — and how much closer to humankind — nature must have seemed to them, since in their eyes human colors dominated even in nature, so that nature seemed to swim, one might say, in the multicolored ether of humanity!”

Thus mused Friedrich Nietzsche, in aphorism 426 of The Dawn, on the peculiar color sense of the Ancient Greeks.

Goethe, in his Theory of Colours, had already noted that the Greek vocabulary for colors is unusual, outside any rule, and is as different from ours as their language was.

Color combinations so improbable that some 18th- and 19th-century scholars claimed the Greeks could not see colors. They could — and well, in fact — but described them differently: surely the human eye is always the same and will remain so.

For the Greeks, colors were above all life and light: a wholly human experience, not a natural, optical one, having nothing to do with the color spectrum of the prism, as defined by Isaac Newton.

Homer, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, names only four colors: the white of milk, the purple-red of blood, the black of the sea, and the yellow-green of honey and fields.

“Black” (melan) and “white” (leukon) meant darkness and light (the Latin word lux, “light,” has the same etymology as the Greek leukos). And according to the Greeks, it was precisely from the mixture of light and shadow that colors were created.

The Greek word xanthos indicates a color ranging from yellow to red and green — perhaps what we might call “copper-green.” Its shade is the warm tone of ripe wheat, but also of the blond hair of Homeric heroes, up to the reddish, warm light of fire glowing at night or the orange of the round sun at sunset.

The adjective porphyreos means “dark,” “in constant motion,” “troubled,” until it comes to mean the purple color that, from the red of blood, extends to blue; porphyreus is one who collects murex shells, from which skilled dyers produced the dye of the same name.

The adjective kyaneos, “cyan,” refers to a blue color so general and vague that it could range from sky blue to dark red and even to the black of death.

Also, my favorite color, glaukos, first of all means “bright, gleaming, flooded with light,” used to describe the sparkling sea. The eyes of Athena are glaukopis — “bright like an owl’s” — with a bluish, azure, grey-blue hue.

William Gladstone, the distinguished English Homerist and politician, was among the first to insist on the luminous impression of Greek colors.

Indeed, in past centuries, when similar linguistic peculiarities in color terms were noted among other peoples — even in the Bible — a heated academic debate arose over whether the ancients, by their very nature, saw fewer colors at the retinal level than our eyes do, to the point that one could speak of Greek color blindness.

Darwin’s theories first, and later studies in physiology and medicine, proved beyond doubt the opposite: the Greeks saw the sea, the fields, the sky, and landscapes in the same colors we see today — or perhaps in more beautiful colors, because they felt the need to express them in a different, personal way.

In the end, the Ancient Greeks gave each color a different meaning in terms of brightness and purity. They saw the light and painted its intensity: thus the sky is bronze-like, vast and star-lit, never just blue; and eyes are glaukos, sparkling, never just blue or grey.

 

[nikos79]

It is. But I get the distinct feeling that you would not have much to say about a photo unless it was a photo of something (where you could actually just talk about that something).

No not really. A photo about something would work well if it wouldn't talk about the same something but about something else.

 

[koraks]

I think this is normal progress of conversation

I think we have very different perceptions of normal conversation patterns.

 

[nikos79]

I think we have very different perceptions of normal conversation patterns.

Well ideally I should have been more careful, cross-check all my facts, do some rigorous research, and be adamant about my opinions but I neither post to a scientific magazine nor write my crystallised views on photography.

We engage into an informal social forum and my views are still fluid

 

[pentaxuser]

nikos79, thanks for the extensive reply but I think that the conversation between you and koraks really covered the reality of the Greek colour blindness - at least to my satisfaction

Oh and this quote from your reply sums it up very well: "Darwin’s theories first, and later studies in physiology and medicine, proved beyond doubt the opposite: the Greeks saw the sea, the fields, the sky, and landscapes in the same colours we see today

pentaxuser

 

[BrianShaw]

Someone could very easily and at any time go take a thousand digital photos that are only about colour. I just used my phone to take this:

View attachment 405061

The next step in the argument will be to say, "That's not a photograph."

I'd classify that as a "hueograph".

 

[koraks]

the extensive reply

I'd like to remark that such an extensive reply takes about 10 seconds to come up with a suitable prompt and another 10 seconds for ChatGPT to produce the output. We are then left with the mission (if we want to take it on) to weed out the hallucinations from the possibly valuable stuff and to produce robust interpretations of the actual sources used that we'll first have to identify properly (as opposed to the vague hand-waving in certain directions as featured in the AI output) so we may form an informed opinion of the subject matter.

Sorry, I can't and won't sugarcoat this. I'm perfectly fine with someone's knowledge being limited( we're all human - or...are we, I start to wonder), people being wrong much of the time, in part or entirely (and I'm no exception) or our abilities to express ourselves in a common language being limited. One of the basic requirements for a conversation to work, however, remains the notion that someone at least acknowledges that they said what they in fact said. It doesn't matter if that was wrong or debatable - we can talk about it. But there's no talking if the meaning behind the words we use is withdrawn the moment they've been uttered.

 

[Milpool]

Photo by Freeman Patterson (35mm chrome)

 

[nikos79]

I'd like to remark that such an extensive reply takes about 10 seconds to come up with a suitable prompt and another 10 seconds for ChatGPT to produce the output. We are then left with the mission (if we want to take it on) to weed out the hallucinations from the possibly valuable stuff and to produce robust interpretations of the actual sources used that we'll first have to identify properly (as opposed to the vague hand-waving in certain directions as featured in the AI output) so we may form an informed opinion of the subject matter.

Sorry, I can't and won't sugarcoat this. I'm perfectly fine with someone's knowledge being limited( we're all human - or...are we, I start to wonder), people being wrong much of the time, in part or entirely (and I'm no exception) or our abilities to express ourselves in a common language being limited. One of the basic requirements for a conversation to work, however, remains the notion that someone at least acknowledges that they said what they in fact said. It doesn't matter if that was wrong or debatable - we can talk about it. But there's no talking if the meaning behind the words we use is withdrawn the moment they've been uttered.

This was not an AI output but the translation of the following article i have read:

Οι αρχαίοι Έλληνες ήταν σχεδόν τυφλοί στο γαλάζιο και το πράσινο | LiFO

Υπάρχει ενδεχόμενο οι αρχαίοι να έβλεπαν από τη φύση τους —καθαρά σε επίπεδο αμφιβληστροειδούς― λιγότερα χρώματα απ' όσα βλέπουν τα δικά μας μάτια, σε σημείο μάλιστα να γίνεται λόγος για τυφλότητα των Ελλήνων;

www.lifo.gr

@pentaxuser asked for my sources what should I have done give him a Greek text and let him get puzzled?