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Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Excellent write-up, which to me makes complete sense.

Something that also struck me as strange was this remark in the Wikipedia article:

> The Bible mentions a "red horse", not far from Homer's red oxen, while honey is described using variations of green in both of these texts.

Here is a glass of honeydew honey:

http://www.honig-onlineshop.at/upload/imgproc/398479_eb.jpg

For which, in my opinion, "variations of green" is a perfectly valid description.

I would also be perfectly comfortable with describing the color of this horse as "red":

https://img.freepik.com/fotos-kostenlos/rotes-pferd-das-an-d...

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The reason 'red' is acceptable to describe the horse, despite the fact that it is clearly not red, is because the concept of orange only entered the English languange relatively recently. Before that it was described as red, and some vestiges of this remain (e.g. redhead).

Imagine a continuous colour wheel. Most people from the same culture today will draw the same boundaries between colors. Red, purple, blue, green, etc. What is to say these boundaries are objective? If in our own language red through orange was once referenced with a single word, why shouldn't red through blue have a single name in ancient Greek?

Red through blue covers a vast segment of your continuous colour wheel analogy, perhaps some two thirds. How likely is it that an ancient culture would have a single word for such a vast expanse of the natural world? Not impossible, just highly unlikely.

The yellow/green thing from the Bible is simply a mistake in Wikipedia.

The word that today means green "yarok" was used in the past to describe gold and an egg: http://www.balashon.com/2006/08/yarok.html?m=1

What's interesting is that both green and yellow come from a common root wood which originally meant grow/growth.

They were the colors if plant growth - green in summer and yellow in autumn.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-E...

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