| | My merry adventures with the color gray
So as a philology student and now certified and certifiable librarian, without-position, I have taken to working on investigations for myself and others, trying to create a position as a researcher. Perhaps, it is training for the one day that I become a librarian-with-position. Or perhaps it is for when I become a superhero, knocking down naiveté and fighting ignorance for the greater good, oh God who am I kidding, by the time I graduate from school, I fear that all positions as librarians and professors will be obsolete, or I will be dead. Anyway off the hyperbolic and on to the exciting story:
I looked up the use of gray in the Bible. The color gray does not exist in the New Testament at all, which is amazing when you think about all the possibilities, especially old people with out the modern wonders of hair dye in the Bible. Well there is henna/mendhi, but nobody, in my understanding, ever referred to the Israelites as the tribe of red headed elders. The Old Testament does have the color gray, though always pertaining to the color of hair and never describing a creature. Now I know, dear readers (wait, when did you become plural) that you will go out and look and perhaps you will find the Bible that mentions in Leviticus that one may eat a certain gray spotted locust and not offend God, well let me tell you, most Bibles do not translate it that way; the Hebrew word is quite different - Hargol, which oddly enough is transliterated into the Norwegian Bible. (I am really glad that I could look many of these passages up online and compare, rather than having to check out 15 different Bibles just to make a point. Thank you religious right!) So good news! Keep on eating those Hargol/gray spotted locusts and no need to fret about eternal damnation for doing so. I do not know Hebrew, so I cannot comment on the use of gray in Hebrew, however the modern word for gray is Ah-for, which might be related to the word for ashes. Canus seems to be the word of choice for gray hair in Latin, which also means elder. This to me suggests that Latin may not have had a word for gray and had to use Canus to describe being old. If this was done for the Bible or even earlier, I am not sure. It is through interaction with other languages that words coving such "new" concepts like gray come into being. Berlin and Kay go into more detail about the evolution of color terms in their book Basic Color. What I found most interesting about their investigation - which at its time was quite revolutionary, albeit slightly lacking in that its breadth is great but its depth leaves major holes in language families like IE - is the comparison of minority languages. But I will leave it at that...
Now in the interest of feeling a bit nostalgic, I found the following website dedicated to Legend City. I remember I went there only once as a child and probably as a reward for some odd thing, like not sucking my thumb anymore. My parents were not big on theme parks and this one was riddled with problems. Nevertheless, it is really a trip down the old lane o' memories to see the website dedicated to it: click here. Back in the day, Phoenix was such a different place. Not to sound all crotchety or anything, sitting on my porch with my corn-cob pipe and talkin' bout them good ol' days when the youngin's respected their elders, but there was a bit of the old west - cowboy, Texas-style, big steak houses and women in long saloon style dresses and men in jeans, chaps and vests style, that is gone now, and I won't comment on exactly how I feel about that, because I am not quite sure, yet....
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| | Posted 2/22/2008 8:14 AM - 1 comments
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