Colors And Language

Brennus   Sunday, December 19, 2004, 08:44 GMT
All people have color vision but depending upon their language and culture they may classify them differently. For example, believe it or not, the Bassa language of Liberia gets by with just two color terms: "HUI" for "purple, blue and green" and ZIZA for "yellow, orange" and red". Languages Like

English, Russian and Hungarian, however, have as many as 11 or 12 primary color terms. Russian even has two primary terms for "blue" SINII "dark blue; navy blue" and GOLUBOI "light blue; sky blue".

Sometimes color terms don't translate precisely from one language to another. The nearest English equivalents to Spanish COLORADO seem to be "orange-red" and "orangy brick red". Lakota has SANG, a color in between gray and white". GLAS is "green" in Gaelic but it also seems to include blue-green and some shades of grey too.

In modern English we find crayola-like color terms being used as in "a powder-blue room", pistachio-green eyeshadow","rhubarb-red lips" and "a canary yellow car" but professional linguists tell us that it is only in advanced industrial societies that people make these kinds of color distinctions.

Do any of you Antimoon readers agree? Do you have any other perspectives or information that you would like to had regarding colors and human laguages?
Brennus   Sunday, December 19, 2004, 08:47 GMT
like to had = should read like to add
vincent   Sunday, December 19, 2004, 10:33 GMT
very interesting indeed! where have you read that?
Brennus   Sunday, December 19, 2004, 16:50 GMT
Thanks, Vincent. I'm sorry about some of the typos. Linguists Paul Kay and Brent Berlin are some of my sources (but not all of them). They have spent their entire lives studying this aspect of languages.
Xatufan   Sunday, December 19, 2004, 23:30 GMT
In Italian, you also find two words for blue: BLU (dark blue; this word has a Germanic origin!) and AZZURRO (light or "normal" blue; I think this word is Arabic).

The Spanish word AZUL (blue) comes from the Arabic word "lazurd". What does this mean? That Latin didn't have a word for blue? Of course it did ("caelurus"), but it doesn't exist in Spanish! Why did Spanish adopted an Arabic word when they could have used the Latin version? I wonder... The same thing happened with Italian: "blue" and "azzurro" don't come from Latin!
Xatufan   Monday, December 20, 2004, 00:14 GMT
It's said that the Piraha language in Brazil doesn't have colors at all.
Easterner   Monday, December 20, 2004, 00:57 GMT
Brennus said: "English, Russian and Hungarian, however, have as many as 11 or 12 primary color terms."

True for Hungarian, for example, it has PIROS (pron. as "pirosh"), which is carmine red or a little brighter, as that found in the US flag, but also VÖRÖS, which roughly corresponds to brick red, and the two may be used interchangeably, but "vörös" is always used where English says "red hair". Finally, we also have BORDÓ, which is "wine red", and actually comes from the name of Bordeaux, apparently referring to the colour of wines. Romanian is also interesting in this respect, it has ALBASTRU for "blue", but also VANAT, which is a sort of violet blue (cannot represent the accents here exactly). Interestingly, "orange" is PORTOCALIU there, which comes from Greek.

By the way, being familiar with some ancient languages like Latin, Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew, I noticed they also seemed to use less colour terms than modern languages, and for more unusual colours they used comparisons to the colour of precious stones or precious metals, which seemed to have been more universally known than nowadays. I have a feeling that more accurate descriptions of colours started to be used around the Renaissance times or a little later, but I am not completely sure about this last point.
Xatufan   Tuesday, December 21, 2004, 01:01 GMT
Portocaliu... Like in that movie of the wedding between the Greek woman with the American man...
Bayou Rover   Tuesday, December 21, 2004, 10:21 GMT
This is interesting!

While learning Arabic, I learnt that the word “Portocali” in Arabic – though the “C” is pronounced a bit differently – means orange in terms of colors. I reckon I have read that the term lingua franca was originally a mixed language used mainly by merchants throughout the Mediterranean until the 18th century and it was mainly Italian with elements French, Spanish, Arabic, Greek and Turkish. So I was thinking it might be the way they adopted some words, but that is still just a possibility.

I always have thought that linking a color to a distinctive object makes it easier to identify the color. For example, when you hear the word “pistachio green”, that yellowish-green color typical to the kernel of a pistachio nut comes to mind.

I am not so versed in linguistics so I guess I can’t be of much help as for the main point.

I was referring to the etymology of main color words, here what I found:
- Of Indo-European origins:
Black, white, blue, brown and yellow
-of Germanic origins:
Green and gray
-of Greek origins:
Purple
-of French origins:
Turquoise
-of Dutch origins:
Pink
-from Sanskrit through Persian and Arabic:
Orange
-From Persian through Arabic, Latin, and French:
Azure
I know I missed many colors, oh well...

Nevertheless, I guess having too many colors in the form of "jet black" or "powder-blue" is a good thing. I just think it all lies behind our perception of things. It might be like there are some cultures that consider, for example, green and blue -or even red, orange, and yellow- a one color with some differences in hues. I guess I can't argue that philosophically because we just made more words for our societies and way of living required it.
Brennus   Tuesday, December 21, 2004, 22:33 GMT

Xatufan,

You're very right about the etymologies for "blue" in Spanish and Italian. The Latin word for blue didn't survive for the most part. Catalan also has blau (masculine) blava (feminine) (even though I know I'm getting into Jordi's specialty here) from the same Germanic source. The Romanian word albastru /albastra is also a mystery. One source said that it is a cognate with French bleuâtre < Vulgar Latin *bluastrum with metathesis. In regional Spanish, primarily Peru, the word celeste is often used for "blue" instead of azul but in standard Spanish celeste is "sky blue" as far as I know. I don't know if Jordi would agree.

Easterner,

Thank you for discussing Hungarian words for "red". Ancient Greek did not have a very big color vocabulary something that the British Classicist William Gladstone noticed over a century ago and was kind of surprised at. For example, chloros (English chlorine, chlorophyll) could mean both "green" and "blue". Modern Greek prasinos "green" appeared in the Late Roman period and originally meant leek or leek-colored. Blé "blue" in modern Greek is obviously a recent Western borrowing.


Bayou Rover,

Thanks for your reply. Yes, many of the more sophisticated color terms in English have a foreign origin.
Jordi   Wednesday, December 22, 2004, 08:07 GMT
Yes you do have "azúl celeste" o even "azúl cielo for sky blue" (light blue), which is different to "azúl marino",(sea blue) or dark navy blue.
Don't forget the French have the Côte D'Azur (Blue Coast) although it is very literary since the normal word is the Germanism "bleu/e"
Yes we do have "blau" and "blava" in Catalan too. Another colour ,which changes enormously is "yellow". We have "groc" in Catalan, which actually comes from Latin "croceus" (meaning originally saffron colour). I think we are the only Latin language to keep Latinism.
French "jaune" (giallo in Italian and "yellow" in English?) would probably come from Latin "galdinus" originally meaning "pale green".
As you can see, colours also evolve.
Easterner   Wednesday, December 22, 2004, 08:26 GMT
>>French "jaune" (giallo in Italian and "yellow" in English?) would probably come from Latin "galdinus" originally meaning "pale green".<<

To this I would add Romanian "galben". English "yellow" and German "gelb" can be both loanwords and cognates, but I tend to prefer the latter.
Sanja   Wednesday, December 22, 2004, 16:10 GMT
I'm not sure if the word "portokali" actually comes from Greek or from Turkish, because Turks also use it as well as some other countries that used to be a part of the Ottoman Emipre, so maybe they all took it from Turkish?
Xatufan   Thursday, December 23, 2004, 02:01 GMT
Brennus: Ehm, I live in Ecuador, a country exactly northwest of Peru, and my first language is Spanish. I'm 14 years old, but that's not very important.

Yes, "celeste" is sky blue. It comes from the word "cielo" (sky, heaven), which comes from the Latin word "caelum". The word "caelureus" ("blue" in Latin), also comes from "caelum"!

I don't know if they use "celeste" instead of "azul" in Peru, because the only Peruvian accent I'm used to is Liman accent. It is very similar to my accent. In Ecuador, we don't use "celeste" as blue, as far as I know (maybe in the Amazonian forest...)
Xatufan   Thursday, December 23, 2004, 02:08 GMT
Jordi: No, Catalan is not the only language that keeps Latinisms. In Spanish, yellow is "amarillo", which comes from the Latin word "amarus" (bitter). Nevertheless, I don't know what is the relationship between the yellow color and poisons.