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Oren's Forge PG 346 (Patreon)

Published:
2025-06-16 21:00:08
Edited:
2025-06-17 19:37:22
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

New 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!

Files

Comments

Dhaka Yeena

That side eye Piv is giving in the last panel. It make me wonder if Hap is telling the truth. Of course Piv could just be watching ramble but still. Also it’s nice to see Ramble ready to defend Swift in a way

Felidae

Fascinating! Thought the animals might have a word for blue for a clear day's sky on the prairie or near a body of water?

treefiddy

The mental image I get with her hap-hazardly running into the bulls is the exact same as a kid running full bore into an opening garage door only to smack their head and go flying backwards like a cartoon

treefiddy

PIvot just seems to be really aggro towards outsiders, she's been giving Ramble the side eye quite a bit this volume

treefiddy

I didn't really make the connection until now, but even in modern English the word blue doesn't always refer to the color blue. For instance, dogs referred to as having blue coats aren't literally blue, they're a darker grey. Because of this, I'd refer to Mishap as a blue wolf since she has a lot of dark grey fur. I remember being at the top of a mountain on a clear non-hazy day and just thinking 'how did ancient civilizations not have a separate word for blue, this sky is very clearly distinct from what we'd call grey. But thinking about it more, it's less they didn't have a word for blue and more they didn't have a distinct words for blue and grey. In English the original meaning of blue was literally 'the color of the sky' which encompassed many different shades of blue and grey. Old English blue is logically distinct from modern blue, in modern English it'd be more accurate to say sky-blue. So it becomes an issue of translation more than anything. Translation is a super wishy-washy thing, you can either translate directly by mapping one word to another i.e. handing someone and apple and seeing what they call it, or you can translate the meaning or concept trying to be conveyed. It becomes especially difficult when one language has separate distinct meanings for something, and another language doesn't (looking at you, German). So in that apple example, you could feasibly get two completely different words out of that translation depending on what technique you use. 'fruit' and 'apple' could both be conceivably accurate translations even though they are different words with different meanings. Schadenfreude doesn't have an equivalent direct translation in English, but it doesn't mean we don't have an understanding of the concept. So for the sake of this story (assuming these characters aren't literally speaking modern day English) Ramble saying "is that why your eye is blue" and "is that why your eye is milky like a pups" are both equally valid translations, they're just emphasizing different quanta of information. That's also a fun thing, since blue and sky-blue are similar but logically separate things in modern English, would you consider that to be a regression in terms of information portrayal compared to old-English? Because you are needing to use more words and syllables to convey the same accurate information about a specific concept. At what point do you consider a language to not have a word for something? Sky-blue is not one word anymore, so does that mean English doesn't have a word for the color of the sky anymore? Or do you consider a language to not have a word when you have to use a simile to be able to convey a concept?

Darkwolf

There are chances that those things looked less distinct to civilizations before the language separated those colors! Some studies have shown that people who natively speak languages that have more words for different distinct color shades (green in the study i recall) can actually differentiate more shades of that color (green) than purple who spoke languages that don't! And similarly they have presented things to people with languages that don't have some colors and people soaking that language had trouble telling two objects that were fairly clearly different colors were actually different. So our knowledge of a colors distinctness and differences may actually impact our ability to see it

Nachta

I knew blue isn't a very common color in nature, didn't even think that other cultures wouldn't have a word to describe it. So cool!

Gabe Bold

“Something he ate” … mmmm 🤔, or maybe something he was fed?

treefiddy

Very true, language plays a very significant role in the structure of our brains. In a similar vein, there are languages and cultures that don't have words for left and right, but rather they rely purely on cardinal directions. For instance you would refer to your right hand as your south hand if you were facing east, or your north hand if you were facing west. People coming from those cultures tend to be far better at discerning their orientation than non cardinal cultures. Languages are need based, and humans tend to be extremely lazy/economical with certain things. Up until fairly recently in humans evolution, the actual ability to manipulate blue things was extremely limited. Blue is something that is very rare in nature, and things that are blue tend to be outside the reach or control of humans. We may have had words for specific things that were blue, but there was no reason to actually group those things together with a concept such as color. The sky, a bird, and very specific flowers/berries don't really have any relation to each other to someone who doesn't know what the concept of blue even is. There would be no need to group those things together. Like Teagan said, it wasn't until we started being able to make and trade things that were blue such as lapis lazulli that we actually started to define blue as a concept.

Julian Seguin

This is the one issue I’ve had ever since volume 2. Swift’s departure from the pack was “swift” pun intended. We didn’t get to see Ramble’s reaction to it. Given that the two siblings seemed to be close, I found it odd that there was no page discussing it.

Teagan Gavet

You know, I agree... The nature of comics (and working solo) has me often picking and choosing what is more important to spend the time and story momentum on. I'm constantly trying to balance what is worth being on a page versus what (I feel) drags. I realized pretty late into working on Vol2 how pivotal Ramble could be...but even in hindsight, if I were adding an additional scene with Ramble and Swift, I think I'd keep that new scene super short and her departure just as abrupt. Swift is really single-focus and when the chips are down, she cares the most about her pups and Red. Swift, to me, is extremely "traditional" in a wolf way and very, very in love with Red. It makes her selfish and reactive (but I think she's interesting because she has room to grow.) Anyway, I recognize it's a bit of a loose thread. I don't think Swift acted out of character but now there's story room for Ramble to process her 'swift' departure. I think you'll get some satisfaction later in this scene, resolution later in the book.

Teagan Gavet

I do want to add, I've tried to make it clear that Swift is on Ramble's mind, to echo some of what I know readers feel. Not only does he have his own internal whatevers about Swift, Gristle is in his ear about her (with obvious concern, has he ever had such concern for Ramble, you wonder? Swift has always seemed like the favorite). It's why Ramble asks about Hap's brother (because he's got siblings on the brain,) and it's why he jumps to the conclusion Swift might have done something (he does not know one way or the other and thus, feels left out; which might just be a common state of mind for him.) This whole scene, aside from learning Zenith stuff, I'm trying to lay the groundwork for him to become a more realized character with understandable conflict and to get people on Team Ramble. Mostly, that means jamming in a lot of subtext to make up for glossing over it earlier, and maybe it's working because you decided to bring it up!

Luckyclaw

Eeeeeeeh, 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)

Teagan Gavet

AAAAH 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!

Luckyclaw

No worries!! I can see EXACTLY how skimming lead you back to Berlin-Kay. I was running into it a ton while gathering the citations, because it's a simple evobio theory that's juuuuust short enough to summarize in an article, and has been left standing for more than long enough to become rooted in the minds of casual linguists. You have to dig to find the counterarguments, and even then, a lot of it is locked behind scientific journals. Always happy to share knowledge!

Sarah

Maybe someONE he ate, perhaps he attacked the wrong bison and got punished?

Felidae

Thanks for the very-detailed explanation. Kind of answered my question at the beginning of the week. Do we have any linguistics records/studies of Prairie/Mountain West Indians on their words for colors, especially blue? Thanks!

David

I think ginger as a hair colour used to be called blue as in blue beard not certain I'm right but if I am why?

Kairo

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.

Luckyclaw

@Felidae I'm sadly not an expert in North American indigenous languages enough to find a linguistic study that specific, but I can give you some basic knowledge to point you in the right direction! You'll want to look at either the Siouan-Catawban language family, the Uto-Aztecan language family, or the Algic language family. Nations that come from the areas you're curious about will *usually* speak a language from one of those three families (though there's more, plus isolates). If you'd like a VERY specific place to start, this page has a ton of links to resources on learning Dakota and Lakota Sioux, including workbooks, audio tapes, book translations, and more. https://www.native-languages.org/dakota.htm And it also has a section on colors specifically, though it's just a straightforward translation of the vocabulary. Note that it has grue, but also a dedicated word for purple, orange, red, yellow, and two types of browns. https://www.native-languages.org/lakota_colors.htm Notably, languages that are spoken in open areas, such as deserts, tundras, and prairies, tend to have Grue. I've seen some theorize that this is because of sun damage to color receptors in human eyes when we live in intensive sunlight-- but personally, I think it's because it's just more practical. You don't need to describe shades of blue in an open field; you're thinking of clouds and their shape, lightness and darkness, how dry (yellow) or lush (grue) the grass is. Eyes, flowers, and clear weather can be described simply as "sky grue."

Luckyclaw

@David I think your mind's crossing the beams on two bits of trivia. You're probably thinking of a mixture of Calico Jack, who was a real pirate, and Bluebeard, who is a fake pirate. Calico Jack, real name John Rackham, was a pirate who sailed with two famous female crewmates. We don't actually have a lot of real historical information on him, including where he was actually from, what his ethnic background was, or even where he got the nickname. It's unlikely he even used that name in real life, but there's two popular "explanations" of the name; Explanation 1: He was often seen wearing flashy clothes made out of a cotton material called calico. If this is the case, then it would be notable because calico was strongly associated with women's textiles in the 18th century; usually dyed in bright colors. Explanation 2: His beard was multi-colored, not totally matching his hair. I've heard that this was referred to as "calico," but I don't have any evidence confirming that it was a widespread term back in the 18th century. Now BLUEBEARD on the other hand, he was never real. He's the main villain in the oldest surviving version of a European folktale about how the villain would marry a girl, tell her not to go into the basement, let curiosity get the best of her, and then kill her in the basement when she finds out he kills wives in the basement. Basement Wife Killing Guy Story. What IS interesting about Bluebeard though, is that the name did end up leading to a sort of "grapevine" change in the folktale in subsequent retellings. You can actually watch the story grow increasingly xenophobic/orientalist as it goes through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, latching onto the "blue" beard as the blueBLACK beard seen in people of "eastern" descent (relative to the western and central europeans telling the story). If you're interested to hear more, folklorist Maria Tatar wrote an interesting book about it; Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives. But, digressing, English as a language has never equated "ginger" and "black" as far as I'm aware. It didn't used to have a term for ORANGE, though, hence why a person with ginger hair is called a "red head." Orange and red were the same color. Same with black and blue.