They say of the Parthenon (being at the Acropolis)... that it used to be daubed with red, blue (apparently bronze at the time) and green colours. Sending love from Greece, amazing show. Huge fan!
I'm assuming the bronze they meant was a weathered, greenish bronze, not that coppery, red they showed. As a lot of people have pointed out, the blue/green separation in languages tends to show up rather late. Light, Dark, and Red tend to show up fairly early, as I understand. Of course, people being how they are, none of this is absolutely universal.
Look up pictures of bronze. "fresh" bronze is reddish but old bronze is more going in to black. The green corrosion you mean is actually on copper roofs and pipes. There is an interesting video by vox about different cultures and there different color perception. In the Iliad the water was also described as red.
@@WillLaPuerta You can really see why they'd call it bronze really - some of those shades really lean towards teal/cyan. IIRC, Homer also referred to the sea as 'wine dark'.
@@Sam-kj9ui I think you forgot that A) Bronze is mostly copper. B) If you spend two seconds to look up pictures of aged bronze you'd see that it comes in a wide variety of patinas, including green. And C) We already had this conversation 9 months ago. Did you even consider reading the other comments? "Thank you for incorrecting me."
It took me awhile to appreciate Johnny Vegas, because I grew up around several people who had his apparent density and buffoonery, but lacked his wit and depth. I still prefer the wit of Phil Jupitus, but have come to recognize and enjoy the talent Johnny Vegas possesses.
It's simply not true that the ancient Greeks lacked a word for the color blue. This is partly due to a simple misunderstanding: William Gladstone, the British P.M. and amateur classicist, popularized the idea that the noun _κύανος_ and the derived adjective _κυάνεος_ refer to bronze. This has been known for a long time to be incorrect - _κύανος_ actually denotes a type of dark blue enamel - but, alas, the myth persists. (Incidentally, _κύανος_ is the etymon of the English word "cyan.") Another word that Homer applies to the sea, _γλαυκός,_ really did start out with a non-color-related meaning: it originally just meant "bright" or "gleaming." However, over time that word also came to signify a kind of light blue color. Classical authors such as Sophocles, Euripedes, and Aristotle frequently use _γλαυκός_ in this way, particularly in connection with human eyes and bodies of water. (The word _γλαυκός_ likewise gave us the word "glaucoma.")
Many languages have no word for 'blue'. In fact English didn't have a word for 'orange' until relatively recently. And it was invented to describe the color of those strange citrus fruits.
He’s wrong. There is and always has been a Welsh word for blue. It’s ‘glas’. There is no original word for green, which is why the modern Welsh word ‘gwyrdd’ is derived from Latin virdis. In Old Welsh ‘glas’ stood for both blue and green. This is why the north Wales word for grass is ‘glaswellt’ - literally ‘blue straw.’
@@MakerfieldConsort yes exactly. And also why a young man is called a ‘glas-lanc’ (literally a green boy - which has the same meaning as English ‘green’ = young inexperienced. The Welsh word for a university fresher is ‘glas fyfyriwr’ - a green student, for the same reason.
Welsh word for blue is "Glas", pronounced in the same way you would pronounce "Glasses", just without the "es" bit at the end. There's also coch, which is red, melyn, which is yellow, porffor, which is purple, gwyrdd, which is green, du, which is black, gwyn, which is white, oren, which is orange, aur, which is gold, and pinc, which is exactly what you think it is.
@@cookielfs That's actually very interesting because that would mean it would correspond to linguistic color theory assuming both words came from the same etymology.
But 'glas' can also mean green and grey. Therebare other words for both those colours, but no other word for blue. So correctly it could be said that there is no colour which mean just 'blue'.
To any Americans confused by Bill Bailey's "Bronze Movie" joke, 'Blue' is also British slang for matters related to sexual activity that some might consider offensive. Though I guess if you are watching panel shows on UA-cam, you might already know that.
IMO "blue movie" is a reasonably well-known phrase in the US. See also _The Simpsons_ when Krusty is thought to have died: Troy McClure: Well, that's the funeral, folks. We'll be sitting shivah at the friar's club at 7:00 and again at 10. You must be over 18 for the 10:00. It gets a little blue.
@@jb888888888 is it really? I had no idea. I had never heard that before I started watching QI & Would I Lie To You. I thought that was an exclusively British thing. Thanx for the polite heads up. A lot of people in UA-cam comment sections aren't as kind with their corrections.
@@JackDManheim I suppose it might be any number of factors. Some people know about X while others have never encountered it. Nobody knows every slang term about everything, you grok me?
I love these compilations, but adore reading the comments! I either continue to learn something Quite Interesting, or almost pee myself giggling. Thanks one and all... 🥴👍🏻👏🏻
Y'all must have an intern whose sole job is to come up with compilation ideas that could include what they say of the acropolis where the parthenon is.
A lot of cultures used to use the same word for blue and green. Chinese used to do that as well. Having a separate word for blue and green is a more modern thing in a lot of languages. I never hear a very good reasoning behind it, besides "they just didn't feel like it needed a separate word" LOL!
No Welsh word for blue? As someone who is Welsh and learned colours in Welsh in primary school I can confirm that there is in fact a word for blue 'glas' . I believe the confusion comes from what the ancient Welsh people considered as blue and what is green which was different to the English.
And none of them, no... not even one of them, thought that Homer might have simply been describing the bronze colored sky at sunrise? OR considered that Homer suffered from color blindness? Since Homer also described honey as green, and wrote that sheep and the ocean were both the color of dark wine?
Actually there is a greek word with a silent π : Sappho (the greek poetress). The third letter is a π which is not pronounced (we pronounce instead the following letter, φ, as a /f/ sound)
It's the same as all the other examples Sandi gave. English speakers pronounce it /ˈsæfoʊ/ (Safo) but Greeks pronounce it Sap-pho [sap.pʰɔ̌ː]. Trust me, I'm Greek. And more specifically from the island of Lesvos, the birthplace of Sappho.
Not really. The architectural technique called entasis that Stephen described was actually implemented in most other Doric temples of that age. It just happens to be very subtle on the Parthenon. If you google some of the ancient Greek temples of Magna Graecia (e.g. Agrigentum, Syracuse) you can see it very easily. The Greeks knew a lot about harmony and aesthetics (both Greek words btw). They even used the golden ratio on their temples (i.e. x number of columns on West and East side of temple and 2x+1 columns on North and South sides). In the Parthenon these numbers are 8 and 17.
Its not that the ancient Greeks didn't 'find a use for distinguishing blue'. That suggests that it's a conscious choice. It's the other way around: if they had a use for that distinction, a word would've emerged. And its possible that what they referred to as 'bronze' is also different to what we think of today. In any case, its the same in many earlier languages: distinction between blue and green comes later in a language's development.
It might sound to people that "didn't find a use" suggests a conscious choice, but I took it to mean that there was no necessity that arose to create that need. I think I recall that in Old Norse the language had a similar trait in that pale colours had one word, yet the same colours only darker had different words. For instance, pale colours such as yellow or red was called white, while a darker yellow or red was called red. I think they also called black "blue".
@@likebot. the black/blue interchangeability is actually really common, same goes for green/blue (e.g Japanese). The word English used for black, initially, was what turned today into 'swart' (similar to German 'schwartz', and all other Germanic variants). Biblical Hebrew for example, doesn't differentiate red from brown.
As Ronnie Barker was escorted into the hereafter by a quartet of choirboys each bearing a candle, so I imagine the memorial service for Stephen will, at some point, offer a rousing chorus of "They say of the Acropolis where the Parthenon is..."
The currently proposed explanation for the lack of a term for "blue" in early ancient Greece in linguistics is that languages evolve similarly when describing color and shades of them, so Ancient Greeks didn't distinguish green from blue but rather thought of them as different shades of the same color, same as with ancient Mexicas, more commonly known as "Aztecs", who didn't have a word for "blue" in Nahuatl, but they'd rather describe something as being "green" or "bright green", same as with Homer and "bronze", rather than describing the polished look of the unoxidized reddish orange metal hue, he was likely describing the vibrant green or aqua/turquoise hue of a weathered piece of bronze since there was no named distinction made in the spectrum of blue-turquoise-green colors.
You see this quite a lot in America, where many of the citizens are wider in the middle. Whether or not this actually does help them stand up more is open to debate. What is known, however, is that if this trend continues then America may well capsize.
About the german word for television Fernsehen or Fernseher for the TV-set, it's just a 1:1 translation of the word television, so it might have to be something else if the greeks didn't exist.
In all languages, Blue is one of the words that developed last, due to it being less common, and less easy to make. Red is ALWAYS first, mostly due to blood, and being easy to make
Pink and orange are examples of colors that also much more recent, and that plenty of languages don't have words for. Pink is really just light red, and orange is a yellow-red. Sky blue is as distinct from dark blue as pink is from red, yet we don't think of it being a different color. But then some languages do think of it as a different color.
S.F. is like a teacher in a school for the gifted children of parents so immensely wealthy & powerful that he must put up with all of their clever insolence & reward all of their intelligent smartarsery.
4:00 The best part of this whole "we the Welsh" bit is that Alan ended up doing a dna heritage test and it turned out that - like almost everyone called Davis and unlike people called DaviEs - he has no Welsh heritage whatsoever
Stephen is actually wrong. There is a Welsh word for blue - it’s “glas”. Many years ago, “glas” meant both blue and green. To distinguish between them, green was changed to “gwyrdd”
Bronze oxide is, turquoise blue (Skyblue Green). Maybe this is why the sky was referred to as Bronze. In China they had no words for green & blue, those words were introduced after contact w/ the West. Prior to that time they used the word Qing (Ching) as in Qing Dao, which means Bluegreen. This worked for them, for many Asians are colorblind in that part of the spectrum. Blue = Lan suh, & Green = Loo suh in Chinese & even today the Japanese call the green traffic light; Ao = Blue ......
For those who wanna know what’s wrong with the Greek alphabet! Go to 16:24 of the link below for the whole clip. ua-cam.com/video/IBzBr9RqzCQ/v-deo.html at 16:24 PS: wrong order, 2 times “χ”, 2 times “φ” one of them upper case, and a lower case omega(ω) with a line over it.
Bronze kinda makes sense, now that I think about it. Sunrise & sunset would be bronz-ish as we know it and the blue sky would still be bronze, but when oxidised. So irrespective of time of day, one can say that the sky is bronze (Night is just the absence of light so you just can't see the bronze) 😱🤯😱
That Acropolis bit puts me in tears everytime.
jimmy and bill carrying it on make it
Where the Parthenon is? What do they say?
When you saw the thumbnail, you knew it was coming.
It puts me in tears too, but only because I'm sick of hearing it.
That was a demonstration of what it would be like to live in a musical.
Bloody hell Stephen, this better be good...
This would suggest that Alan should adopt "bronze whale" whenever a blue whale trap question appears. Or "wine dark whale."
Wine dark whale... Peak nerd knowledge, right there XD
"Wine dark whale"? I am not worthy...
They say of the Parthenon (being at the Acropolis)... that it used to be daubed with red, blue (apparently bronze at the time) and green colours. Sending love from Greece, amazing show. Huge fan!
Lovin' would be easy if your colors were like my dreams: red, bronze and green!
Hi from Ireland 🇮🇪 🇬🇷
Cool to see a Greek here! 🇬🇷Hello from Sweden!👋🇸🇪
Rgb acropolis
@@compositeembryo7186 😂
Everyone clicked on this to hear what they say of the Acropolis where the Parthenon is.
Predicting lots of Acropolis comments...
"🎵what will they say, what will they say🎵"
Well, you know what they say
@The Creekin About the Acropoliiiiis... where the Partenon iiiiiiis....
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
That one has to be in there, surely.
I'm assuming the bronze they meant was a weathered, greenish bronze, not that coppery, red they showed. As a lot of people have pointed out, the blue/green separation in languages tends to show up rather late. Light, Dark, and Red tend to show up fairly early, as I understand. Of course, people being how they are, none of this is absolutely universal.
Look up pictures of bronze. "fresh" bronze is reddish but old bronze is more going in to black. The green corrosion you mean is actually on copper roofs and pipes.
There is an interesting video by vox about different cultures and there different color perception. In the Iliad the water was also described as red.
@@derorje2035 Look up "bronze patina" Some of those are green. Bronze contains copper, so it may vary depending on the percentages.
@@WillLaPuerta You can really see why they'd call it bronze really - some of those shades really lean towards teal/cyan. IIRC, Homer also referred to the sea as 'wine dark'.
I think you're thinking of copper.
@@Sam-kj9ui I think you forgot that A) Bronze is mostly copper. B) If you spend two seconds to look up pictures of aged bronze you'd see that it comes in a wide variety of patinas, including green. And C) We already had this conversation 9 months ago. Did you even consider reading the other comments? "Thank you for incorrecting me."
Every time I come across Johnny Vegas' "because it is" bit, I end up with tears in my eyes. It is too freaking funny.
It took me awhile to appreciate Johnny Vegas, because I grew up around several people who had his apparent density and buffoonery, but lacked his wit and depth. I still prefer the wit of Phil Jupitus, but have come to recognize and enjoy the talent Johnny Vegas possesses.
Poor Johnny, being tortured by Stephen like that.
listen, yall saw the thumbnail, you knew exactly what scene you wanted and everything is just that extra cherry on top
I like to think I'm smart like David Mitchell... then I watch QI and realize I'm smart like Johnny Vegas.
You wish...😉
And yet, when you watch Cats Does Countdown and it comes to artistic/poetic expression, it's the reverse.
It's simply not true that the ancient Greeks lacked a word for the color blue. This is partly due to a simple misunderstanding: William Gladstone, the British P.M. and amateur classicist, popularized the idea that the noun _κύανος_ and the derived adjective _κυάνεος_ refer to bronze. This has been known for a long time to be incorrect - _κύανος_ actually denotes a type of dark blue enamel - but, alas, the myth persists. (Incidentally, _κύανος_ is the etymon of the English word "cyan.") Another word that Homer applies to the sea, _γλαυκός,_ really did start out with a non-color-related meaning: it originally just meant "bright" or "gleaming." However, over time that word also came to signify a kind of light blue color. Classical authors such as Sophocles, Euripedes, and Aristotle frequently use _γλαυκός_ in this way, particularly in connection with human eyes and bodies of water. (The word _γλαυκός_ likewise gave us the word "glaucoma.")
I just started a part-time study, my new go-to answer will be "because it is". Thanks !
I mean, Homer was supposedly blind, so maybe we shouldn't rely on him to tell us what color things were.
Homer may never have existed, as a historical individual person.
@@the-chillian thanks for the input Chris
Actually they called him blind because he closed his eyes while reciting his epic poetry. I saw a documentary about it in the 90s.
D'oh!
I guess that's why he says DOH so much when being proven wrong on things.
Many languages have no word for 'blue'. In fact English didn't have a word for 'orange' until relatively recently. And it was invented to describe the color of those strange citrus fruits.
Why didn't the ancient Greeks have a word for blue?
Because they didn't.
but they did, and it's where we get the word cyan from
But the sky...is blue
Well they did... "Copper" was their name for blue, and if you do a quick google search you can see that copper ore is blue.
Describing the sky as bronze is very poetic and quite accurate i.e. Verdigris on the statue of liberty.
@@kaneminik Bronze is an alloy, so it wouldnt be seen in an ore.
I never tire of the "They say..." bit. It cracks me up every damn time.
I miss David Mitchell tricking Stephen into believing that the supermarket Argos calls their employees ”Argonauts”. 😂 Best. Comedic. Timing. Ever!
Stephen's reaction: "Do they?" was brilliant. Hook, line and sinker.
@@MichaelCoombes776 Followed by David's final "No!" in a tone of 'Obviously not, caught you'.
ua-cam.com/video/FWumP41cDZs/v-deo.html
Infamous Acropolis bit, followed by "well, maybe not" and Johnny V's meltdown.
I love that they flummoxed Stephen Fry so well with the Parthenon.
He’s wrong. There is and always has been a Welsh word for blue. It’s ‘glas’.
There is no original word for green, which is why the modern Welsh word ‘gwyrdd’ is derived from Latin virdis. In Old Welsh ‘glas’ stood for both blue and green. This is why the north Wales word for grass is ‘glaswellt’ - literally ‘blue straw.’
That's confusing, the Irish word for green is "glas"!
That was a lovely fact, thank you
Diolch yn fawr.
Presumably that's why Greenfield (near Holywell) is known in Welsh as Maes-glas.
@@MakerfieldConsort yes exactly. And also why a young man is called a ‘glas-lanc’ (literally a green boy - which has the same meaning as English ‘green’ = young inexperienced. The Welsh word for a university fresher is ‘glas fyfyriwr’ - a green student, for the same reason.
"BECAUSE IT IS! (sobs) because it is..."
I feel like Johnny a lot of the time
Some days we're a Stephen, some days we're a Johnny
Agree I often feels like Johnny more seldom like Stephen!😉
Welsh word for blue is "Glas", pronounced in the same way you would pronounce "Glasses", just without the "es" bit at the end. There's also coch, which is red, melyn, which is yellow, porffor, which is purple, gwyrdd, which is green, du, which is black, gwyn, which is white, oren, which is orange, aur, which is gold, and pinc, which is exactly what you think it is.
There is a welsh word for blue, "glas".
That doesn't seem to have enough W's, L's,Y's or letters in general 😉
That's funny because Glás is green in Irish.
@@cookielfs That's actually very interesting because that would mean it would correspond to linguistic color theory assuming both words came from the same etymology.
But 'glas' can also mean green and grey. Therebare other words for both those colours, but no other word for blue. So correctly it could be said that there is no colour which mean just 'blue'.
Tyrconnell nah, green is gwyrdd, and grey is llwyd
To any Americans confused by Bill Bailey's "Bronze Movie" joke,
'Blue' is also British slang for matters related to sexual activity that some might consider offensive.
Though I guess if you are watching panel shows on UA-cam, you might already know that.
IMO "blue movie" is a reasonably well-known phrase in the US.
See also _The Simpsons_ when Krusty is thought to have died:
Troy McClure: Well, that's the funeral, folks. We'll be sitting shivah at the friar's club at 7:00 and again at 10. You must be over 18 for the 10:00. It gets a little blue.
@@jb888888888 is it really? I had no idea.
I had never heard that before I started watching QI & Would I Lie To You. I thought that was an exclusively British thing.
Thanx for the polite heads up. A lot of people in UA-cam comment sections aren't as kind with their corrections.
@@JackDManheim I suppose it might be any number of factors. Some people know about X while others have never encountered it. Nobody knows every slang term about everything, you grok me?
I love these compilations, but adore reading the comments! I either continue to learn something Quite Interesting, or almost pee myself giggling. Thanks one and all... 🥴👍🏻👏🏻
Hi, Anita! Giggling, eh? Would that be with a psilent pee? ;-)
Elli P ummm...anyone got a spare pair of knickers? 😂
I'm currently taking a break from writing my Classics thesis and this makes me want to cry...
Do you suppose they called the sky "bronze" because they were thinking of the color that bronze oxidizes to? I believe that is a blue-green.
It also does look bronze at sunrise and sunset
Copper pipes and roofs get green, not bronze.
@I.M. Shirley Rongh Tin
@@derorje2035 most languages use the word green instead of blue
So what they say of the Acropolis where the Parthenon is, is wrong. That there are in fact straight lines.
Well, I heard they say it anyway.
Still glad they say it, though. Otherwise we'd all have missed out on one of TV's greatest moments.
Wait, what do they say?
Whatever.
5:58 all together now
I’m less than two minutes in.. if this is referring to what I think it is, and it better be, I will scream 😍
7:43 I love that Stephen says that to David, in front of his Would I Lie to You co-host
Thank you.
Y'all must have an intern whose sole job is to come up with compilation ideas that could include what they say of the acropolis where the parthenon is.
"They say of the Acropolis....." 🙏
A lot of cultures used to use the same word for blue and green. Chinese used to do that as well. Having a separate word for blue and green is a more modern thing in a lot of languages. I never hear a very good reasoning behind it, besides "they just didn't feel like it needed a separate word" LOL!
I just started the video. I'm waiting for "They say of the Acropolis where the Parthenon is."
Johnny Vegas’s mental breakdown is giving me high school flashbacks
No Welsh word for blue?
As someone who is Welsh and learned colours in Welsh in primary school I can confirm that there is in fact a word for blue 'glas' .
I believe the confusion comes from what the ancient Welsh people considered as blue and what is green which was different to the English.
And none of them, no... not even one of them,
thought that Homer might have simply been describing the bronze colored sky at sunrise?
OR considered that Homer suffered from color blindness?
Since Homer also described honey as green,
and wrote that sheep and the ocean were both the color of dark wine?
The Parthenon and the Giant Tortoise gets me every time.
1:45 anyone feel that was deffo a laugh track
It does sound really fake
The question was “what color was the sky in Ancient Greece” not “what color did the ancient Greeks call the sky” blue was the correct answer.
FIGHT! 💃 FIGHT! 💃 FIGHT! 💃
It's funny how the majority of the panel were wearing alternating stripes when talking about how vertical/horizontal stripes make you look thinner.
Ahh, the “continuously figmented” questions & logic that is the Parthenon🎶... of the Acrpoliiiis...🎶🤣
Let me tell you what they say about the Acropolis where the Pathenon is......
EDIT: And there it is🤣 HHEY HEY HEY.
Classic
what do they say? What do they say?
Excuse me Stephen I've got a question...
Where the Parthenon is...
What do they say?
Actually there is a greek word with a silent π : Sappho (the greek poetress). The third letter is a π which is not pronounced (we pronounce instead the following letter, φ, as a /f/ sound)
It's the same as all the other examples Sandi gave. English speakers pronounce it /ˈsæfoʊ/ (Safo) but Greeks pronounce it Sap-pho [sap.pʰɔ̌ː]. Trust me, I'm Greek. And more specifically from the island of Lesvos, the birthplace of Sappho.
I'm another Greek here and I can confirm that The π in Σαπφώ is definitely NOT silent.
I wonder if the reason why the columns of Greek buildings also might have been bowed slightly is to get them assembled right.
Not really. The architectural technique called entasis that Stephen described was actually implemented in most other Doric temples of that age. It just happens to be very subtle on the Parthenon. If you google some of the ancient Greek temples of Magna Graecia (e.g. Agrigentum, Syracuse) you can see it very easily. The Greeks knew a lot about harmony and aesthetics (both Greek words btw). They even used the golden ratio on their temples (i.e. x number of columns on West and East side of temple and 2x+1 columns on North and South sides). In the Parthenon these numbers are 8 and 17.
Its not that the ancient Greeks didn't 'find a use for distinguishing blue'. That suggests that it's a conscious choice. It's the other way around: if they had a use for that distinction, a word would've emerged. And its possible that what they referred to as 'bronze' is also different to what we think of today.
In any case, its the same in many earlier languages: distinction between blue and green comes later in a language's development.
It might sound to people that "didn't find a use" suggests a conscious choice, but I took it to mean that there was no necessity that arose to create that need. I think I recall that in Old Norse the language had a similar trait in that pale colours had one word, yet the same colours only darker had different words. For instance, pale colours such as yellow or red was called white, while a darker yellow or red was called red. I think they also called black "blue".
There's a nice video on that topic from Vox: ua-cam.com/video/gMqZR3pqMjg/v-deo.html
It has to do with how the society and civilisation develops.
@@likebot. the black/blue interchangeability is actually really common, same goes for green/blue (e.g Japanese). The word English used for black, initially, was what turned today into 'swart' (similar to German 'schwartz', and all other Germanic variants). Biblical Hebrew for example, doesn't differentiate red from brown.
@@likebot. Like the rather recent distinction in english between red and orange. That's why the bird is called a red robin, according to QI.
@@xonxt Thanks! Interesting vid!
For those interested:
Pterodactyl = Πτεροδάκτυλος = Pte-ro-DHAK-tee-los (Imagine dh pronounced like the th in "the")
Philosophy = Φιλοσοφία = Fee-lo-so-FEE-a
Psalm = Ψαλμός = Psal-MOS
Phillip = Φιλιπ = Phillip
I knew the answer to every question, I just chose to keep it to myself.
The word I and many others speaking Welsh use when describing the colour blue is glas. Also used for describing grass, and silver, I know!
Holy god in heaven the sound of that intro... I can't tell if the rest of it is too quiet in comparison or if my goddamn eardrums are blown out O.O
*WORSHIP THEM*
*WORSHIP THEM*
In Portuguese (at least in the Brazilian one) we say "pterodáctilo" (sounds almost the same as in English) but we do pronounce the P.
I think they broke Johnny Vegas
He may have been slightly damaged to begin with.
"I... Hate... This show"
- Phil Jupitus
5:29 the clip you've all come here to see ❤
I hate when Stephen is explaining something interesting and a guest interrupts him saying they're bored.
Totally
Ikr, if you're bored by interesting facts, why not find a different comedy show to be on?
Goddamned right. Get off the damned stage if you’re bored!
Tbf, it's a comedy show. No doubt some of them are just there to have a laugh.
It was funny, therefore justified.
Brass, when heated and cooled correctly, create an amazing color not unlike the desert sky.
As Ronnie Barker was escorted into the hereafter by a quartet of choirboys each bearing a candle, so I imagine the memorial service for Stephen will, at some point, offer a rousing chorus of "They say of the Acropolis where the Parthenon is..."
The currently proposed explanation for the lack of a term for "blue" in early ancient Greece in linguistics is that languages evolve similarly when describing color and shades of them, so Ancient Greeks didn't distinguish green from blue but rather thought of them as different shades of the same color, same as with ancient Mexicas, more commonly known as "Aztecs", who didn't have a word for "blue" in Nahuatl, but they'd rather describe something as being "green" or "bright green", same as with Homer and "bronze", rather than describing the polished look of the unoxidized reddish orange metal hue, he was likely describing the vibrant green or aqua/turquoise hue of a weathered piece of bronze since there was no named distinction made in the spectrum of blue-turquoise-green colors.
You see this quite a lot in America, where many of the citizens are wider in the middle. Whether or not this actually does help them stand up more is open to debate. What is known, however, is that if this trend continues then America may well capsize.
5:28 is what you're all here for.
About the german word for television Fernsehen or Fernseher for the TV-set, it's just a 1:1 translation of the word television, so it might have to be something else if the greeks didn't exist.
In all languages, Blue is one of the words that developed last, due to it being less common, and less easy to make. Red is ALWAYS first, mostly due to blood, and being easy to make
Pink and orange are examples of colors that also much more recent, and that plenty of languages don't have words for. Pink is really just light red, and orange is a yellow-red. Sky blue is as distinct from dark blue as pink is from red, yet we don't think of it being a different color. But then some languages do think of it as a different color.
My mind is blown about the straightness of the columns on the Parthenon. Stephen has just called my 6th Form Art History teacher a liar.
Take what you here on QI with a pinch of salt. Entasis does exist on the Parthenon. It's just a lot more subtle than other earlier Doric temples.
@@georgem3270 Hoorah, Miss Don's reputation is restored!
This is the "how many brains did the man with 2 brains have" question all over again
funniest ever 'where the parthenon is'. Brilliant.
So you're telling me that what they say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is, is actually a lie?
Yes
S.F. is like a teacher in a school for the gifted children of parents so immensely wealthy & powerful that he must put up with all of their clever insolence & reward all of their intelligent smartarsery.
As a Welshman, I can confirm there IS no word for 'blue'.
Coch = Red, Melyn = Yellow, Glas is GREEN but people use it for blue too.
I do like Johnny Vegas
4:00 The best part of this whole "we the Welsh" bit is that Alan ended up doing a dna heritage test and it turned out that - like almost everyone called Davis and unlike people called DaviEs - he has no Welsh heritage whatsoever
2:53 Alan has a point... many, in fact.
Welsh for blue is "glas."
It used to cover the whole range of colors from green to blue to slate grey to silver.
@@the-chillian
Taking into account the changes in the pronunciation of "g" when it follows other sounds, "sky blue" is then "awyr las."
Surely, the word is 'pisína'.
Wait.. that's a geek *thing* with a silent pee. My bad.
Oh, that's a good one!
If they didn't go out for a few after... the Acropolis episode... when did they?!😂
So Homer thinks Marge has bronze hair?
You'd think he'd prefer Olive Oyl to Marge.
We all knew what was coming
Isn’t the welsh word for blue glas?
Stephen is actually wrong. There is a Welsh word for blue - it’s “glas”.
Many years ago, “glas” meant both blue and green. To distinguish between them, green was changed to “gwyrdd”
Pretty sure the welsh for blue is Glas
That means there actually *_are_* straight lines at the Acropolis etc.?
Interesting thing with the ancient Greeks not having a word for blue, similarly, classical Japan didn't have a word for green.
I just enjoy watching them all play off each other and recognizing something they to exploit for comedy.
Bronze oxide is, turquoise blue (Skyblue Green). Maybe this is why the sky was referred to as Bronze. In China they had no words for green & blue, those words were introduced after contact w/ the West. Prior to that time they used the word Qing (Ching) as in Qing Dao, which means Bluegreen. This worked for them, for many Asians are colorblind in that part of the spectrum. Blue = Lan suh, & Green = Loo suh in Chinese & even today the Japanese call the green traffic light; Ao = Blue ......
Homer was blind
For those who wanna know what’s wrong with the Greek alphabet! Go to 16:24 of the link below for the whole clip.
ua-cam.com/video/IBzBr9RqzCQ/v-deo.html at 16:24
PS: wrong order, 2 times “χ”, 2 times “φ” one of them upper case, and a lower case omega(ω) with a line over it.
Video was blocked due to copyright
This was one slippery country to do a compilation on.
So after all that it turns out that there are straight lines on the acropolis where the Parthenon is...
Bronze kinda makes sense, now that I think about it. Sunrise & sunset would be bronz-ish as we know it and the blue sky would still be bronze, but when oxidised. So irrespective of time of day, one can say that the sky is bronze (Night is just the absence of light so you just can't see the bronze) 😱🤯😱
the welsh word for blue is glas
months late but as a Welshman there is a word for blue. it’s glas
There's more greek moments in QI. Where's the part 2?
I am crying 😂😂
According to Google Translate the Welsh word for Blue is Glas.
Check it out, but who do I believe Q.I or Google Translate?
The Welsh word for blue is glas.
glas is welsh for blue
Welsh for blue is Glas