What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Rev. Rye]

Orange as a color existed before the fruit arrived to the Old World. It was called tawny, but more brown than the fruit.

The colour was named after the fruit. The fruit name has a Sanskrit origin, if memory serves.

Boru

It does, though the Arabic and Persian nāranj and nārang are a bit more immediate than the Sanskrit nāraṅga.

[Rev. Rye]

Orange as a color existed before the fruit arrived to the Old World. It was called tawny, but more brown than the fruit.

Like I said earlier, the discussion in question is less about whether a colour actually existed and more about whether a given culture understood the concept of said colour.

Case in point: the two most ubiquitous blue things on the planet are the sky and the sea. The Ancient Greeks would definitely be familiar with both, but if you look at Homer’s poems, the best he can come up with is “wine-dark.” He’s good at describing whether or not things are light or dark, but beyond that, things get… weird. Odds are, with Homer, we caught the Greeks in a very early stage of understanding colours.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Orange as a color existed before the fruit arrived to the Old World. It was called tawny, but more brown than the fruit.

Like I said earlier, the discussion in question is less about whether a colour actually existed and more about whether a given culture understood the concept of said colour.

Case in point: the two most ubiquitous blue things on the planet are the sky and the sea. The Ancient Greeks would definitely be familiar with both, but if you look at Homer’s poems, the best he can come up with is “wine-dark.” He’s good at describing whether or not things are light or dark, but beyond that, things get… weird. Odds are, with Homer, we caught the Greeks in a very early stage of understanding colours.

Of course the colour existed. It’s a wavelength, so it’s as old as the Universe.

It’s like the old chestnut, ‘What was the largest island in the world before Greenland was discovered?’

Boru