A) On “wine-dark”: The ancient Greeks presumably, like the rest of us, saw aspects of a thing’s visual appearance besides merely tint. I see plenty of reds and indigos (“blues”; more on this later) that are of the same intensity and darkness of what might be termed parallel greens. So the sea isn’t wine-colored; it just has a parallel clarity and value (value being the color-theory word for lightness/darkness).
Everyone knows that the sky is Blue because God is a Penn State fan.
ok, I should add that the idea that the Aegean Sea was of merely parallel clarity and darkness to Greek wine of Homer’s time was just my interpretation–a guess.
all right, on to…
B) I see a lot more than 8 colors. Words like “red” and “blue” cover ranges of colors. But the more specific colors are often named after objects or substances. “Orange,” “hazel,” “bone,” “wine,” “peach,” “aqua,” “ruby,” “indigo,” and others–which have varying levels of specificity.
C) We in Anglo-American culture have developed a specific standardized system of color description (reinforced through those colorful children’s books): Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Purple are thought of as clearly defined, because for us they are. We were taught them. And any color can be described (pretty well) by a combination of these terms; Gray, Brown, White, Black, Pink; and words like Light, Dark, Bright, Dull, Pale, Faint, and Intense.
However, this leaves a little room for error (and besides, there’s that bugbear of variations in individual retinal cone response). That aqua color that some call green and some blue was dubbed “argument color” in my mom’s family. (actually, it’s a cyan; more on this later)
Furthermore, the terminology has evolved (of course–like the rest of our language!).
D) So, when my 80-year-old grandmother describes cats as “yellow” that I see as “orange” (actually, it is accepted to refer to tabbies of a certain tint as “marmalade,” which happens to nail it), I don’t know if it is because
- This is an accepted term (“yellow cat”) like “red hair”–many people call my auburn/hazel hair red, but few would call paint of that color red;
- If that falls under her “personal definition” of yellow, learned in rural Ohio 70 years ago;
- Her 80-year-old eyes see color differently than my youthful eyes.
…or some other variation on why people call a thing the color they call it.
(She and my grandfather also consistently refer to her car, which is–to my eyes and to my mom’s–grey on the outside with blue [indigo] interior, as “the blue car”; who knows?)
and …
E) While our culture tells us that the primary colors are <FONT COLOR="#AA0000">RED</FONT>, <FONT COLOR="#0030AA">BLUE</FONT>, and <FONT COLOR="#FFFF00">YELLOW</FONT>, and the secondary colors are <FONT COLOR="#008000">GREEN</FONT>, <FONT COLOR="#8000aa">PURPLE</FONT>, and <FONT COLOR="#FF7D00">ORANGE</FONT>, this doesn’t exactly work. When I was in junior high, I did that art-class paint-mixing color wheel (using a deep crimson red and a deep indigo blue). The greens and purples were off–too dull. I was using the wrong color of “blue.”
Physicists have pinned down the typical “additive primaries”–colors perceived when only one type (of three) of retinal cone cell responds. They have dubbed them, in line with easily recognized color terms, <FONT COLOR="#FF0000">RED</FONT>, <FONT COLOR="#0000FF">BLUE</FONT>, and <FONT COLOR="#00FF00">GREEN</FONT>.
(I find it amusing that the people who study this are physicists, though color is a largely biological phenomenon–the response of an animal cell to a range of electromagnetic radiation wavelengths, and the brain’s classification of that response.)
Printers use a “four-color process” to get the color photographically right; inks are in black and the “subtractive primaries”–each of which is supposed to fully stimulate two cone types while not firing the other. Thus, a printed page will remove a programmed amount of stimulus for each of the three cone types. (Black ink can remove the stimuli for all three.) In the presence of sufficient light, the page will “fool” the eye into seeing a full range of color. (A picture of an orange doesn’t have to reflect the same exact wavelengths as the actual orange, just a set of wavelengths that will stimulate the retina the same way.) Those three colors are <FONT COLOR="#00FFFF">CYAN</FONT>, <FONT COLOR="#FFFF00">YELLOW</FONT>, and <FONT COLOR="#FF00FF">MAGENTA</FONT>. Notice that they have been precisely named, which avoids confusion. Our culture got the red-yellow-blue triad about 200(?) years ago [someone have a reference on this?] when someone [not an English-speaker; I want to say “Goethe”…] experimented with pigments to find the primary and secondary colors. Vague and imperfect description got us to today’s point, where orange is easily recognised as a distinct color, but cyan is not.
(I could go on, but it’s late…)
Color names are not all that arbitrary. Although there are differences (Russian has two colors where we have “blue” and Welsh has three colors where we have “blue” and “green”), in general, the vast majority of languages follow a consistent pattern in naming, as detailed in the original article at http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_168b.html
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
I don’t think color naming is totally arbitrary; but if your society conventionally calls indigo blue, say, a shade of the same color as jet black, and your people define these two colors as shades of the same, then you’ll mentally group them together.
What gets me is this; when I use html or a computer graphics program, I get what looks like this to me:
ADDITIVE PRIMARIES (Subtractive secondaries, when printed out): Scarlet, Green, “dark blue”
SUBTRACTIVE PRIMARIES (Additive secondaries, on screen): Bright yellow, “light blue”, “purple-pink”
TERTIARIES: Orange, yellow-green, “sea green”, “dull blue”, Purple, “deep reddish pink” (prints as crimson)
IN ORDER:
strong><font color="#FF0000">red</font>
<font color="#FF8000">orange</font>
<font COLOR="#FFFF00">yellow</font>
<font color="#80FF00">yellow-green</font>
<font color="#00FF00">green</font><font color="#00FF80">sea-green</font>
<font color="#00FFFF">light blue? (cyan)</font>
<font color="#0080FF">dull blue?</font>
<font color="#0000FF">deep blue? (indigo)</font>
<font color="#8000FF">purple</font>
<font color="#FF00FF">purple-pink</font>
<font color="#FF0080">reddish pink</font> **
The red, orange, and yellow all look clearly distinct; their apparent complements all look “blue” to me. But if my terminology is to conform to reality, rather than a socially constructed myth, I have to learn to call cyan one thing and indigo another. If I take them both for shades of “blue”, when they are two hues, then my sense of primary and secondary colors is a lie. At least cyan does look different to me, now that it’s pointed out. But why was I not told as a child this is a different color? And why does orange look so clearly “orange” to me, while the “blues” seem so close?
So now, I try continually to train myself to see the difference between hues of “blue.”
If I can do it with the warm colors, right?
umm, “green” & “sea-green” are supposed to be 2 lines in my previous post. “greensea-green” sounds poetic, but not what I meant.
“One night your shoulders will ache/The next day when you wake/You’ll sprout wild wings and fly/Just like in Swan Lake”–the Church, “Swan Lake”