Indigo, Violet and Purple

All kinds of violet are purple and all kinds of purple are violet.

So far the only big difference in opinion seems to be whether violet or purple is the bluer of the pair. But that may be a little like arguing about teal and aqua.

Thanks for your replies. Shall respond properly in time. I've just got to note that in Japanese the word for blue (& often green) is "ao" or "aoi". There is also "midori" which means green however there are many things that we'd call "green" that are called not "midori" but "ao" in Japanese.

That's interesting. It seems that everyone has got slightly different ideas on the names of colours. It's also interesting what Brennus writes about English's being a 11 colour language. Actually, that's how I think of things. Every colour, to me, falls into one of the following broad groups.

1 black
2 grey
3 white
4 pink
5 red
6 orange
7 yellow
8 green
9 blue
10 purple
11 brown

I suppose that these are the same 11 colours that Brent Berlin and Paul Kay have in mind.

The Romans had no colour grey. For them, grey was just a kind of shade of green.

In English, light blue and dark blue are just different shades of the same colour, but for the Italians they are two different colours completely.

... but that's like us: pink & red are two different colours completely whereas in Middle English & Old English they were just different shades of the same colour if I'm not mistaken.

I think of the English language as being a 14 color language. Those colors are:

1 black
2 grey
3 white
4 pink
5 red
6 orange
7 yellow
8 green
9 blue
10 purple / violet (they're synonyms to me)
11 brown
12 gold
13 silver
14 clear

According to Berlin and Kay's classification scheme of color typography 'gold' and 'silver' would be secondary color terms. Only primary colors are allowed to determine what kind of "color term" a language is. 'Clear' doesn't mean anything when you are talking about color tones. Therefore, English is an 11 color term language.

Clear is the color of glass.

Robert,

I'm not sure 'clear glass' can be expressed in color terms. It often has a grayish or greenish tint to it but you never hear anyone really commenting on it. I remember Berlin and Kay talk in their writings about how the human eye seems to be sensitive only to certain wavelengths and how people often don't bother to assign color names to colors outside this wavelength. I may not be saying it quite right, but this was the gist of their argument.

A fine spring day is yellow
A fine summer day is orange
A wet summer day is grey
A warm summer night is indigo
A stormy winter night is black
A thunderstorm day is purple
A fine winter day is silver and white
A foggy autumn day is...sort of whitish grey
Christmas day is red and green
Pay day is all the colours of the rainbow

The weekends are pink

Red and yellow and pink and blue
Orange and purple and green...
I can see a rainbow.....
See a rainbow....
See a rainbow.....
Sing a rainbow too

Goodnight all...

Yeah, I don't think of clear as a color. A quality, sure, but not a color per se -- just the opposite of opaque, which is no particular color, either. Gold for me is a metallic shade of yellow, and silver a shade of gray. Pink is really a shade of red (or more properly, a tint).

No nor do I count clear as a colour nor silver nor gold. They are not properly colours because they only look the way they do by reflecting/transmitting/absorbing the light they way they do. I mean, take a photo of something clear, silver or gold and the image will still be the same colour but no longer clear, silver or gold.

If pink is included then so should acqua.

But is it a question of what should be included? I see it as a question of what is included. We don't think of pink as a shade of red but think of aqua as a shade of green (whether we should or not) ... don't we?