The ancient Greeks had no word for blue?

The four primary colours for Greek painting described by Pliny the Elder were red, yellow, black, and white. The ancient Greeks rather classified colours by whether they were light or dark, rather than by their hue. The Greek word for dark blue, "kyaneos", could also mean dark green, violet, black or brown. The ancient Greek word for a light blue, "glaukos", also could mean light green, grey, or yellow.

other answers are good . Also it is partly due to things like certain colour paints being harder to make than others . Words for fine definitions of things are not used if at that time in history the items described are not common. For example you might expect that people living in a desert might have only have one or no words for types of fish because they hardly ever see them. (over simplified)

Nor does modern Welsh: both use the same word for blue and for green. Homer's phrase "the wine-dark sea" is a mistranslation, he was describing it as "the sea which sparkles like wine." Greek and Latin were more concerned with the reflectivity of a surface rather than its hue and had differed words for e.g. dull white and shining white. Every language divides up the spectrum of light in its own way, and Russian for instance makes more colour differences than English.

Yeah, that's true. Some color perception is cultural, mainly between blue-green and red-purples.

edit: The sky and sea of ancient Greece are more likely to be gray or green than actual blue. Wine dark I would say is more blacky purple.

edit 2: I just want to point out it's not just the word. Words effect perception. They've done studies on cultures with different words and ones without; the cultures with a word for a color recognize and perceive it much faster than those without.

Partially true, as others have answered it's due to how the language works, they had specific words for certain shades of blue and general words for hue, but no definite noun for blue. In Homers Iliad there is a lot of 'it was the colour of....' but how much that relates to general speech or writing is unknown.

Every language can describe any color, in some way, but the categories of colors sometimes differs.

Many languages, across many different language families, including the one English belongs to (Indo-European), considered orange to be a shade of red or yellow. Orange as a distinct color came later.

Japanese originally considered green and blue to be shades of the same color. Japanese later got a word for green, and the the green/blue word now means blue, most of the time. But a few things Westerners consider green, like traffic lights, use the Japanese word for blue.

I am sure the Death Bunny was right. Some shades of blue most languages have, like English, are different enough to be considered different colors.

Just like us now considering orange to be a distinct color, but some languages consider it a form of yellow red.

It is never the case that a language would not be able to describe the color of the sky or the sea, or recognize that they are not exactly the same color. It's just a matter of which words and how many words are needed to indicate the difference, when they care about it. Normally, English speakers don't care if it's a dark or light blue, for example, but some languages do.

Some cultures in the Far East have no separate words for "blue" and for "green". So the sky and leaves on trees must all be "bleen" (or whatever word you want to invent).

IIRC (from QI/No such thing as a fish) they had different words for different shades of blue.. But not a single word that covered all shades. so, No, they had no word for 'Blue'

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