Painting the new reality: Colours in Neo-Latin

13th International Colloquium on Late and Vulgar Latin (Latin vulgaire – latin tardif XIII)

Colours are a crucial area of translation theory, and studies of language contact, because the colour spectre is differently segmented by different cultures. Crucially, colours, ostensibly the most conspicuous mark of identity of an object, receive different denominations across cultures. Translation of texts containing colour notations is never simple, and a crucial passage in Aulus Gellius 2.6 neatly encapsulates the problem for ancient scholars, in a debate between Favorinus and Fronto on the respective merits and superiority of the Greek and the Latin language: Gellius muses about the terminological confusion between Greeks and Romans in naming colours. In this paper, we analyze the colour equivalents occurring in the corpus of bilingual Greek-Latin dictionaries going under the name of hermeneumata, with special reference to the hitherto unpublished Hermeneumata Celtis, which we are jointly editing. What are the lexical areas from which ancient bilingual lexicography draws its colour terminology? Were there traditions reflecting on such syntagmatics? And how did ancient lexicographers cope with, or even perceive, the different semantics of colour terms in Greek and Latin? An in-depth analysis of the Greek-Latin matches for colour terms in the Hermeneumata Celtis provides an excellent testing ground for a better assessment of the making and character of this large bilingual collection and for our knowledge of the Late Latin vocabulary.

Does the categorisation of colours follow directly from the physiological mechanisms of perception, or do individual languages and cultures divide up colour space in idiosyncratic ways? 1 For centuries academe has heard reports or rumours of exotic peoples whose colour systems seem irreconcilable with those of the English language. 2 We still read of the Hanunóo of the Philippines, who were found to have a subtle vocabulary for colour contrasts but no definite names for absolute values of hue, 3 and of the Dani of Papua New Guinea with their 'cool' term and 'warm' term, mola and mili, but no other colour words at all; 4 while at the other extreme lies the Irish partition of what English calls 'green' between three distinct categories glas, uaine, buí, and the Russian perception that light blue and dark blue, goluboj and sinij, constitute distinct and incommensurate entities rather than subsets of a single category. 5 However, over the past thirty years scholarly views on the language of colour have followed the overall movement in the human sciences, away from trust in cultural relativism and towards the adoption of a squarely universalist paradigm: with the result that any handbook of semantics currently in print will tell you that colour terms are part of the innate shared equipment of the human language faculty and do not vary significantly from language to language. In Steven Pinker's words, "Humans the world over colour their perceptual

Ancient languages rely on concrete and specific meaning rather than abstraction, naming basic color categories differently than do the contemporary languages upon which Berlin and Kay base their universalist evolutionary theory. The ancient languages named red and blue with words transparently derived from precious stones; they applied these to more than one basic category; and they exchanged these traditions, and sometimes the terms. We find the evidence through interpretation of the same philological data used to support conclusions favorable to Berlin and Kay's thesis. Superficially, the validity of Berlin and Kays thesis is thrown into doubt, as it would appear that it loses its "universal character" due to the neglect of the nuances visible in ancient languages: application of their hypothesis actually obscures the early evidence. StudÉng linguistic color expression of antiquity contributes to understanding color expression, thus improving overall insight into the evolution of color terminology.

Journal of Modern Education Review, ISSN 2155-7993, USA, 2018

We aim to investigate characteristics and complexities of ancient Greek chromatic lexicon in the wake of the discussion triggered by the well-known theory formulated by B. Berlin and P. Kay in 1969 (eleven universal basic colour terms appear according to an evolutionist-implicational sequence articulated in 7 stages), thus further understanding, from a neo-relativistic perspective, specific ways of conceptualizing and verbalizing colour in Greek culture. This investigation is carried out through the analysis of a corpus particularly representative: Aristophanes' comedies. For various terms and epithets new and original explanations and translations are presented with respect to tradition, stressing the importance of socio-cultural factors (e.g., technology of production of purple), and also using modern anthropological comparisons (e.g., Hanunóo system from the Philippines) or concepts of Cognitive Linguistics, such as "prototype". We will see how this type of approach allows to solve some secular "aporias" related to the subject, and how the universalist hypothesis of the two American scholars as well as the notion of basic color term, neglecting important connotative, diachronic and cultural aspects, are inadequate to describe, understand and interpret ancient Greek chromonymy, both for the richness and structural complexity of the latter and for its peculiar diachronic development.

Color-Terms in Social and Cultural Context in Ancient Rome, 2013

This book addresses color in Roman society, a topic of growing interest in recent years. Rachel Goldman introduces the topic with a brief account of the history of the problem, of the linguistic and anthropological debates it has provoked, and of recent archaeological research.

2022

The Bible is one of the books that has aroused the most interest throughout history to the present day. However, there is one topic that has mostly been neglected and which today constitutes one of the most emblematic elements of the visual culture in which we live immersed: the language of colour. Colour is present in the biblical text from its beginning to its end, but it has hardly been studied, and we appear to have forgotten that the detailed study of the colour terms in the Bible is essential to understanding the use and symbolism that the language of colour has acquired in the literature that has forged European culture and art. The objective of the present study is to provide the modern reader with the meaning of colour terms of the lexical families related to the green tonality in order to determine whether they denote only color and, if so, what is the coloration expressed, or whether, together with the chromatic denotation, another reality inseparable from colour underlies/along with the chromatic denotation, there is another underlying reality that is inseparable from colour. We will study the symbolism that/which underpins some of these colour terms, and which European culture has inherited. This lexicographical study requires a methodology that allows us to approach colour not in accordance with our modern and abstract concept of colour, but with the concept of the ancient civilations. This is why the concept of colour that emerges from each of the versions of the Bible is studied and compared with that found in theoretical reflection in both Greek and Latin. Colour thus emerges as a concrete reality, visible on the surface of objects, reflecting in many cases, not an intrinsic quality, but their state. This concept has a reflection in the biblical languages, since the terms of colour always describe an entity (in this sense one can say that they are embodied) and include within them a wide chromatic spectrum, that is, they are mostly polysemic. Structuralism through the componential analysis, although providing interesting contributions, had at the same time serious shortcomings when it came to the study of colour. These were addressed through the theoretical framework provided by cognitive linguistics and some of its tools such as: cognitive domains, metonymy and metaphor. Our study, then, is one of the first to apply some of the contributions of cognitive linguistics to lexicography in general, and particularly with reference to the Hebrew, Greek and Latin versions of the Bible. A further novel contribution of this research is that the meaning is expressed through a definition and not through a list of possible colour terms as happens in dictionaries or in studies referring to colour in antiquity. The definition allows us to delve deeper and discover new nuances that enrich the understanding of colour in the three great civilizations involved in our study: Israel, Greece and Rome.

(Cambridge Classical Studies), 2009

The study of colour has become familiar territory in recent anthropology, linguistics, art history and archaeology. Classicists, however, have traditionally subordinated the study of colour to form. By drawing together evidence from contemporary philosophers, elegists, epic writers, historians and satirists, Mark Bradley reinstates colour as an essential informative unit for the classification and evaluation of the Roman world. He also demonstrates that the questions of what colour was and how it functioned – as well as how it could be misused and misunderstood – were topics of intellectual debate in early imperial Rome. Suggesting strategies for interpreting Roman expressions of colour in Latin texts, Dr Bradley offers new approaches to understanding the relationship between perception and knowledge in Roman elite thought. In doing so, he highlights the fundamental role that colour performed in the realms of communication and information, and its intellectual contribution to contemporary discussions of society, politics and morality. Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome was nominated and longlisted for the 2011 Warwick Prize for Writing.

Semitica et Classica, 2017

This article has been prepared within the framework of the "Language of colour in the Bible: from word to image" (FUSPBS-PPC09/2015) research program financed by University CEU San Pablo and Banco de Santander. My deeper thanks go to Lourdes Garcia Ureña for having invited me to participate in this fascinating project and for her insightful criticism on this paper. I would also like to thank Julia Rhyder for her valuable support with the preparation of the paper and for her revision of my English, and the anonymous readers

Embodiment in Latin Semantics, edited by Wm. Short, John Benjamins, 2016

Some prominent, recent research on Latin color language asserts that the ancient Romans mostly lacked abstract color concepts, instead conceiving of “color” as intimately connected with the material substances that Latin color terms typically referred to. This chapter, through a detailed study of Pliny the Elder’s color language, shows not only that the Romans were fully capable of forming and expressing abstract color concepts, but also that they expressed relationships among these concepts using structured metaphors of location and motion in an abstract color space. The evidence from Pliny also suggests that these expressions derived from the everyday language of artisans, merchants, and farmers, and thus appear more frequently in technical, rather than literary, Latin.