Gladstone drew attention https://archive.org/details/studiesonhomerho03glad to the poverty of colors in ancient Greek suggesting that the Greek sense of color was somewhat primitive.
Here is a description of research suggesting that it is simply the result of the number cuts in the spectrum the Greeks chose to make and its pretty much in line with what is seen in other languages:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg
Thank you for the link (I know, I am somewhat late). Latin’s colour words are also confounding, for example Lewis & Short’s definition of caeruleus:
This does not really help when trying to imagine what is being described.
Vale,
Carolus Raeticus
The Greeks didn’t consciously choose how to divide up the spectrum in speech. It is thought that the color words in a language after actually linked to how people in that culture perceive color.
As for caeruleys, a similar situation occurs in Classical Chinese, where one color word, qing, could be used to describe the sky, the ocean, blue, green, or black.
An interesting description of colour that I came across recently was ξανθὸς ὡς πῦρ in the pasage:
According to wiki yellow flame is produced by sodium chloride. In the skin I guess it means a lighter tone.
I think many of the Greek-English correspondences for color in the Odyssey as given in the video were wrong, and there are some missing like χλωρός yellow/green. I haven’t read Gladstone though, so I don’t know if these correspondences come from there or from somewhere else.
I think the so-called color terms quite often convey other meanings than just hue, i.e. a specific wavelength of the visible spectrum; they also convey things like texture, brilliancy or gloss. λευκός has often connotations of brightness, μέλαν ὕδωρ “black water” is applied to water when it comes from a deep underground source (δ 359).
They didn’t say it in the video, but in my understanding an important assumption in the Berlin-Kay basic color term model was that to define a color in a given language, the informant was asked to select the most “typical” representative for each color term. So while “red” might include very different hues in different languages, and there might even be considerable differences between speakers of the same language, there is remarkable overlap when one looks at the most “typical” representative.