of blue visible in the sky, namely "", which is nonetheless considered a shade of blue. Germanic In Old Norse, the word "blue" (from proto-Germanic ) was also used to describe black (and the common word for people of African descent was thus 'blue/black men'). In Swedish, , the modern word for blue, was used this way until the early 20th century, and it still is to a limited extent in modern Faroese. German and Dutch distinguish blue (respectively and ) and green ( and ) very similarly to English. There are (compound) terms for light blue ( and ) and darker shades of blue ( and ). In addition, adjective forms of most traditional color names are inflected to match the corresponding noun's case and gender. Greek The words for “blue” and “green” completely changed in the transition from Ancient Greek to Modern Greek. Ancient Greek had () “clear light blue” contrasting with () “bright green”; for darker shades of both colors, and were replaced by (), meaning either a “dark blue or green”. The words had more than one modern meaning: in addition to “clear light blue”, also meant “turquoise” and “teal-green” – it was the typical description of the color of the goddess Athena’s eyes, portrayed as either gray or light blue. As well as “bright green”, was also used for “acid yellow” (compare “chlorophyll”). Furthermore, not only meant “turquoise” and “teal-green”, but could mean either a “dark blue” or “dark green” or just “blue” (adopted into English as “cyan” for light sky-blue). Those terms changed in Byzantine Greek as seen from the insignia colors of two of Constantinople’s rival popular factions: (, “the Greens”) and (, “the Blues”). It is not known if those groups’ names influenced the word change or if they were named using the new color terms, but whichever way it went, () is a Modern Greek word for “green”. The ancient term for blue () has become an archaic term in Modern Greek, replaced by () or (, “sea colored”) for light blue / sea blue, and the recent indeclinable loan-word (, from French bleu; μπ = b) is used for blue. In the Modern Greek language, there are names for light and dark blues and greens in addition to those discussed above: As a rule, the first two words of the list are accepted as shades of blue, and the rest