Oren's Forge PG 346
Added 2025-06-16 21:00:08 +0000 UTCNew page out next Monday!
Little side note, I don't think Ramble has a word in his lexicon for "blue."
Hey, Luckyclaw has a great comment below that goes way more into depth about this in the ancient world! I got it wrong, fell into the misinfo pit that is the Internet!
(Patreon, I know, it's a niche one, by I wish formatting had a strikethrough option. Maybe it does, I don't know.)
Anyway, I do think that Ramble's pack has a very different understanding of "blue" than the Zenith pack and I fumbled the context explaining why it might be that way. It's obvious though: in Ramble's world, blue to him is the color of a puppies eyes and it's significance probably ends there. It's a baby color for babies. The color might be more important to the Zenith, we'll see!
Comments
So... the fact that Hap has a broken and healed jaw is really interesting. That's a really common impact injury that you see in predators.
Kairo
2025-06-22 17:12:38 +0000 UTCMaybe someONE he ate, perhaps he attacked the wrong bison and got punished?
Sarah
2025-06-17 22:58:56 +0000 UTCAAAAH thank you, I am happy to stand corrected. I had this half baked memory about the color blue and I struggled to find what I wanted to reference specifically, but couldn't--then skimmed and-- eh. Didn't go nearly deep enough. I do believe Ramble's pack has a different association with "blue" in general than say, the Zenith pack, but I hamfisted my thinking. I shall amended my post!
Teagan Gavet
2025-06-17 19:27:24 +0000 UTCEeeeeeeh, the "blue" thing is still also a misconception, in that an outdated linguistic theory is so badly explained to people that it borders on misinformation. Even with the "ancient people couldn't see blue" internet misinfo out of the way, people end up thinking the Greeks couldn't tell between naturally occurring shades of blue when they could and did-- they just generally had more emphasis on light/dark intensity. Homer used the term "wine-faced sea" to invoke a dark and intense color, but also poetically capture the TURBULENCE of the water. It's metaphor. Ennius was describing the sea as "caeruleus"-- "sky blue," which evolved into the modern term cerulean. They even had a word for blue-black, kaunos, which through linguistic drift turned into kyanos and then into cyan. The oldest words we have for blue even predate written language, going back into Indo-European ROOTS. In Homer's case specifically, there were a LOT of "color nouns" he was "missing." Yellows and greens were within the same color group. Brightness being a type of color meant that his white sheep and shining iron were violet. Wine FACED becomes wine DARK, but is that red? Black? Dark blue? It's actually ENGLISH that lacks a direct translation. Homer's intended audience of Mediterranean islanders and sailors knew exactly what that meant. It's true that a lot of cultures see blue and green as one color, called "grue" linguistically, but English's color divisions are also arbitrary. Russian actually further divides "blue" into goluboy (bright, greenish, cyan-like shades) and siniy (royal, rich, azure-like shades). And the bottom line is that Greece did NOT have grue. It had SEVERAL words for types of blue; glaukos, kyaneos, porphyreos, and lampros. https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/05/ancient-greek-colours.html https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7307 Even the trade network thing is just... completely false, I'm sorry to say. There's no other word for it. A LOT of blue materials existed in the ancient world, across all cultures and continents, and lapis trade came loooong after we have evidence of many of these languages having nouns for blue. Woad, indigo, tekhelet, lead, kyanite, sapphires, turquoise, cobalt, whortleberry-- and that's not even counting blue flowers, blue crops, blue fish, blue birds including peacocks, blue-gray livestock, blue eyes in horses and humans, or the entire sky. Plenty of Native American languages also have pre-contact words for blue, no Egyptian trade routes needed. Saying the cultures Egypt traded with didn't have a word for blue before needing to describe "lapis blue" is like saying no one had a word for green before the French gave us chartreuse liquor. The outdated linguistic theory buried under the Blue Discussion is the Universalist Theory of Color Cognition by Berlin and Kay (1969), which essentially proposes that there's 11 possible linguistic color groups, and that languages develop these terms in a predictable pattern. They claim it starts with Light and Dark, then gets Red, then Green or Yellow, going up until you have all 11 of their color groups (which, suspiciously, correspond to the English colors). This Universalist Theory (aka Berlin-Kay) has been under massive critique in the last 40 years, because it's incredibly reductive. It treats language like RPG levels where an earlier "level" is more primitive, failing to capture WHY and WHERE a language draws boundaries between colors. It also fails to account for languages that do have several color terms but lump them in different ways-- like how Middle Welsh had a term for purple (eohec, heather-colored) while being "stuck" on grue, or how Namibian Himba speakers have a completely different categorization of color based on lightness and darkness, or even TYPES of grue divisions. https://www.daytranslations.com/blog/language-changes-color/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/095269519500800402 Personally, I think the Relativist view is much more accurate. Blue is not a rare color to begin with, but cultures don't exactly develop words based on commonness. Linguistic evolution is based on *need,* which is a subtle but important difference. As examples; - Languages developed in areas of high sunlight are more likely to "only" have grue, because light and dark are more useful differentiators - Languages spoken near large bodies of water are more likely to have unique terms for blue, because the exact blue of the sky and water are a matter of smooth sailing or watery death - Languages developed in large populations are more likely to distinguish between green and blue, because big communities tend to have advanced textile production - Inukitut having at least 12 unique base words for what English-speakers would just call "snow" or "ice," plus affixes to describe common snow and terrain-related hazards - British English having a delightfully high number of words describing rain, plus local dialect terms - Lakota having a type of "celestial blue" relating to the sky, versus dark blue for goods and clothing - Piraha having no past or future tense, and describing attributes (color, numbers) in relative terms. https://www.science.org/content/article/sunlight-affects-whether-languages-have-word-blue https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/inuktitut-words-for-snow-and-ice https://starkeycomics.com/2019/03/14/100-british-words-for-rain/ https://howtosayguide.com/how-to-say-blue-in-lakota/ https://www.fl4k.com/blog/the-piraha-language EDIT: Sorry it got so long. I included citations because language is cool EDIT EDIT: All that said, it would still be possible for Ramble's language to have grue, or completely different color terms. In fact it honestly makes sense he wouldn't have color terms at all, but be using "milky like a pup" to express that the eye is "colored with inexperience" to him. Maybe Gristle's Packspeak only has "dark/colored" and "light/colorless" attributes; it would be VERY fitting for their dialect to be a hard binary, compliments how "smallminded" they are (at least, by Zenith standards)
Luckyclaw
2025-06-17 19:11:29 +0000 UTC
