In the context of the developing English Language, it is interesting (but may just be coincidence) that there were not many orange things to talk about. England has only a couple of native orange-coloured flowers and no native orange-coloured edible fruits.
Youra blue? My dogsa blue.
OTOH, we do have a thousand terms for grayish-greenish-brownish.
(Only half kidding.)
In other words, the pink/red distinction is a fairly recent one. That’s part of why I thought it might be an easier example for people to grasp.
And surely, a low-intensity red would not be “light red”; it would be “dark red”?
Pink is actually a light red with some blue added in. It’s more like a light magenta.
But they do in some languages.
Consider looking at a landscape that has trees and grass. The trees are easily distinguished from the grass because they’re a much darker green, while the grass is lighter and yellower. Yet both are indisputably green. In English that is.
Suppose there’s a language which has yellow-green as a distinct basic color word, which we’ll call lime. For them, the trees are green and the grass is lime. They’re not the same color at all. They’ll think “How can you say those are the same color? Those are clearly and totally different colors. There’s no way lime is the same as green.”
You’re doing the same as these hypothetical people except with blue and green.
My Latin-English dictionary translates blue as caeruleus and green as viridis. Here’s a scholarly paper (pdf) (Diachronic Trends in Latin’s Basic Color Vocabulary) that says that caeruleus is much less common than viridis in Classical Latin texts. If they were both basic color words, you’d expect them to be of about the same frequency. So clearly caeruleus was not a basic color word in Classical Latin.
FWIW, to me a first-tier color would be one that has its own name (red, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, white, gray) and a second-tier color would be one named after a fruit (orange), flower or plant (violet, pink, indigo), dye (purple), etc. In other words, if the color name is just a color name, it’s first-tier; if it was taken from the name of some object or substance of that color, it’s second-tier.
Of course, that’s only in English. “Brown” may be first-tier in English, but other languages use their words for coffee, tea, or chocolate to describe the color.
It’s amazing that nobody has noted the obvious and well-documented reason why blue is an unnecessary word. People simply call blue things sky-colour or sky-green. Everybody in the world is intimately familiar with what colour the sky is, so it’s really simple to use an unambiguous compound word for blue. Modern English does the same thing with many colours. Very few people actually use the word scarlet, we just say blood red. The same goes for colours like pink, buff, violet, rose, duck egg and so forth. they aren’t actually colours, they are comparatives that people understand perfectly well to be colours just from context. Sky is a perfectly valid colour in many languages.
Of course, no poet is going to describe anything as sky-dark. It’s an oxymoron because the sky is light. Which is where the need for extra colours may come from. You can describe a colour by comparatives, but it corrupts imagery.
Dry grass against green shrubs even more clearly register as separate things, and would have been seen a lot more by humans of the first 100, 000 years of our existence. Nonetheless, the colour of dry grass was only given a name until a couple of hundred years ago. before that it was just straw coloured or dry-grass coloured or dung coloured.
Really? You think that when someone on the plains of the Kalahari wanted to describe a blue ox, she went and found some blue pigment and then stripped the bark off a tree and drew picture of a blue ox just so she could describe it?
That sounds so absurd that I need to ask for a reference.
Truly early cultures didn’t have ideograms. Writing is a very recent invention.
Once again, I’ll need a reference for this. You are saying that when someone on the Asian steppes was looking for their bay horse, they had no need for a descriptive colour because they had no writing?
Oxen are black, white, grey, brindle, roan, tan, yellow, red, blue and about a thousand other colours. The idea that all oxen are or ever have been brown has no basis in reality. And ancient farmers were even more particular about the colour of their livestock than modern people. It was usually of great significance to them.
I’m afraid that’s not an adequate rule. If we could trace the etymology of what you call first-tier colors back to their ultimate origin, we’d almost certainly find that they come from the name of some object or substance. Most such origins are lost in prehistory.
The argument I heard on Radiolab was that you only bother having a name for a color if you can make that color. Egyptians did have a way to make blue, so they had a name for it. Most other cultures around that time did not.
I’ll note that there are languages to this day that don’t actually have the distinction. They use secondary modifiers. Cherokee uses basically sky bluegreen and plant bluegreen to separate the colors. They also refer to orange as basically super-yellow.
I’ll also note that you don’t need to see a difference in the hues to see a contrast between the sky and green leaves. The leaves are a much darker color. You can easily see them in black-and-white photos. You need situations where the brightness is the same and color is the only distinguishing feature.
Finally, I’ll note two other things from the Radiolab podcast. There is that tribe that they actually showed green and blue color swatches and found they had trouble telling them apart (but could more easily distinguish shades of green). And that one researcher taught his kid all the colors, but avoided letting her know what color the sky was. And it took her a long time to call the sky blue. At first, she couldn’t even figure out what he was pointing at. And her first attempt was "white."So the idea of assigning a color to the sky is not inherent.
Blake,
For what reasons was livestock color of great significance to them?
Is there something to the idea of some colors being associated with particular concepts, moods etc from a biological or anthropological point of view (i.e.: more broadly and deeply than the influence of individual cultures)?
I’m always amused that Japanese says “tea-color” for brown. Like really, we never needed to talk about brown until there was tea? More likely that whenever we talked about brown things, we already knew what color they were.
Then there’s also this Tom Scott video that gives a nice summary. And it has a ton of sources you could look at for more info.
According to it, the ancient Greeks seemed to group colors by light and dark more than via hue.
Have you ever looked at the etymology of the word “brown” in English?
*Word Origin and History for brown Expand
adj.
Old English brun “dark, dusky,” developing a definite color sense only 13c., from Proto-Germanic *brunaz (cf. Old Norse brunn, Danish brun, Old Frisian and Old High German brun, Dutch bruin, German braun), from PIE *bher- (3) “shining, brown” (cf. Lithuanian beras “brown”), related to *bheros “dark animal” (cf. beaver, bear (n.), and Greek phrynos “toad,” literally “the brown animal”). *
Emphasis added.
I searched a word frequency list gathered from Project Gutenberg. Here are the color words I found (excluding ambiguous ones like “gold”):
white 268 322465
black 437 191272
red 571 141588
green 633 126431
blue 710 109449
brown 905 85875
gray 1352 60200
yellow 1377 59051
purple 2959 25912
pink 3549 20698
orange 3569 20573
violet 7614 6939
First number is rank, second is frequency. You can see that frequency drops off pretty quickly. There are only two gaps that look larger than usual; after orange there’s a drop from 20573 to 6939, or about 3x. That’s the “traditional” 11-color break. But there’s another significant-looking one, over 2x, between yellow and purple. Going by that, there are only 8 “first-tier” color words. The choice seems arbitrary to me.
“Gold” is ambiguous but not “orange”?
Says who?
I think I’ve read that the Greek word that Homer used did not literally mean ‘wine dark,’ but more like ‘wine-looking.’ Whether that was meant to imply a bluish color (blue wines?) or a possibly a frothy appearance, or something altogether different is another question.
The word for green in Japanese is “midori”. But it’s a relatively recent word, in the past the word “ao” meant both blue and green. Midori as a concept didn’t enter Japanese culture until the Heian period (about 1,000 years ago) and while that seems like a long time ago, consider that Japan has been inhabited by a single, evolving culture for around 15,000 years. And Midori was still considered just a shade of Ao. Imagine that teal was a primary color, and green was just a shade of teal. Green wasn’t fully considered a separate color until after World War II (during the US occupation). Even now, what we in the western world would consider to be green doesn’t quite match up to the Japanese concept of it.
To stretch a point. It’s just as accurate to say the US is the end product of a 15-20,000-year-old local culture. (Consider, for example, the First Nations’ influence on the Constitution.) But that is of course largely absurd; US history as we know it begins in the 1500s.
Leaving out traditional claims, Japanese culture as we currently know it began about the same time as the Romans.