Japanese distinguished blue only as a shade of green, the fact of which is present in the language today. Traffic lights are still called blue, and one of the prefectures is called Blue Forest.
So is there a Sanskrit word meaning the color orange?
The OED only shows that the Sanskrit word for “orange” referred to an orange tree, and suggests that that came from a Dravidian language.
So, the possible order is Dravidian to Sanskrit to Persian to Arabic to Italian.
There may well be a word as the OED was using this for the evolution of the word without regart to the color or the tree. I think the tree sense almost always came first.
Gah, sorry, the first sentence was supposed to be "Japanese distinguished green only as a shade of blue…
Most of East Asia, actually. It’s an artifact of the Chinese sphere of influence, the classical Chinese word, character and theory referring to a dark/deep blue-green.
In The Dance of Life, anthropologist Edward Hall notes that the Hopi (I think) also have no word for “orange,” but refer to it as a shade of red. He describes an experiment (and I am going from memory here, so forgive me if I get some of the details wrong) involving flash cards, each containing a basic shape – circle, square, triangle, etc. – in a solid color. Put a red circle down next to an orange circle, and anybody can tell the difference. But show the person five cards, including a red circle, take them away, show them an orange card, and ask if this was one of the five, and they will say yes. This all gets into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, about how language colors (sorry) our perception of the world.
The naming of colors in languages is extremely varied:
The study usually cited is that of Berlin and Kay. They believed that each language always had between two and twelve basic color terms. They believed that you could more or less tell which colors would be included for each language if you knew how many basic color terms there were. Recent studies claim that it’s even more complicated than that. Some people claim that the idea of color isn’t a basic notion in some languages. Some claim that some languages can’t give a color name to certain shades. In any case, the notion that because there is a word in language X for a color there must be a word in language Y for that color is hopelessly wrong.
my question exactly, and i’m sure 1000s of others have the same question. did cecil ever address this?
The link to Cecil’s answer was in post #1