Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for June 16, 2012

There is some backup to this statement, per Homer’s epic poetry, which does not mention the color blue

yes, but in the original hebrew the color blue was not there at all.

Yeah, but SHE didn’t think of making RAY out of it… So THERE!

WNYC’s “Radiolab” show on color had a fascinating segment on the matter of “discovering” the color blue. Homer’s poetry mentions lots of colors, but no blue. Same with a lot of ancient writings. Did people not see blue, or did they have no reason to give it a name, or what? One theory holds that we tend not to notice a color (in the sense of giving it a name) until we can make it artificially, and blue is one of the hardest (and last) pigments to make. Here’s a link to the segment, if anybody’s interested: http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/sky-isnt-blue/

…i know blue.

Until now.

It has been proven that it is not a question of /seeing/. There are still primitive tribes with only a few color words, but tests show that they can tell the difference. Even today, you can’t take it for granted that colors are always the same. For example, there was no word for “orange” in English until just a few centuries ago, and most languages don’t have a word for “pink”. On the other hand, Russian and Italian have words for “sky blue”, and, in the Welsh language, the lines between brown, green, and blue are different, so that, in Welsh, grass is "blue"—although this is changing now, due to influence from English.

Some years ago, it was demonstrated that languages seem to pick up color words in a particular order, starting with “red”. See “Color Words” in Wikipedia.

Wow! What fascinating comments today. So much about colour we take for granted.

I think someone’s made the comment before that Marigold is a lot like Llewellyn.

@Dana SimpsonYou know French? I now have enough more respect for you. (That’s mainly just because I’m a linguistic nerd.)

“Oeuvre” is French for “Opera” [Latin] (but “Opéra” is French for “Opera” [Italian]).

Blue was one of the most elusive colors when the ancients were creating dyes..There’s a reason it’s called “Royal Blue”.. And yes, blue is a nice color.

Uhm… As in “blu-ray”, mynx.

Isn’t there a sky in Unicornville?