Omängum Fra'uti first lists red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet-- the spectral colors we are all taught. These are light colors, and therefore additive. I think that indigo is too close to either blue or violet, and was probably added to make 'Roy G. Biv' work. So lets discard it.
I was about to say. Indigo is not a rainbow color, it was originally a dye from India
I do agree with you that most of our color words are related to description of objects. I talked to an artist friend of mine who says it's true that mainstream English didn't have a lot of color words until recently, but artists did because they needed to be able to specify these things. Back then most guys ground their own pigment and mixed their own paint, so it was named after what was in it.
It took a long time before people were able to mix colors that weren't clearly defined, like on the spectrum Prrton showed where one white looks just like the next one. Then marketing departments of those companies started looking for new names. Some were purely PR like "modern pink", others were similies "cornflour blue". There's also the infamous "avocado" or "mint cream", "lipstick red", words that were supposed to sound appealing.
Then there's the organic stuff, "Lincoln green" was the color they used in Lincoln for their cloth. "British racing green", "fire engine red" are other colors that were named after where they were used.
Nowadays these companies do their utmost to contribute to total madness by trademarking all their color names, so the same color has different names, depending on the brand of paint.
Also I seemed to recall this topic being mentioned on QI once, so I grabbed my
"Book of general ignorance" and lo and behold!
I'll summarize:
| The sky in ancient Greece was not blue, but bronze. There is no word for blue in ancient Greek. |
(They used this word for copper too, which makes sense to me because it turns blue verdigris when it corrodes.)
| The nearest words "glaukos" and "kyanos" are more expressions of the relative intensity of light and darkness than attempts to describe color.
Homer mentions only four actual colors in the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey, roughly translated as "black", "white", "greenish yellow" (applied to honey, sap, and blood), and "purply red".
When Homer calls the sky "bronze" he means that it is dazzlingly bright, like the sheen of a shield, rather than "bronze-colored". Likewise he regarded wine, the sea, and sheep as all being the same color "purply red".
Aristotle identified seven shades of color, all of which he thought derived from black and white, but these were really grades of brightness, not color.
In the wake of Darwin it was postulated that the early Greeks' retinas had not evolved the ability to perceive colors, but it is now thought that they simply grouped objects in terms of qualities other than color, so that a word which seems to indicate "yellow" or "light green" really means fluid, fresh and living, and so was appropriately used to describe blood, the human sap.
There are more languages in Papua New Guinea than anywhere else in the world but, apart from distinguishing between light and dark, many of them have no other words for color at all.
Classical Welsh has no words for "brown", "grey", "blue" or "green". Their color spectrum was divided differently. One word "glas" covered part of green; another word the rest of green, the whole of blue and part of grey; a third word the rest of grey and most of brown. Modern Welsh now uses the word "glas" to mean blue.
Russian has no single word for "blue", it has two "goluboi" and "sinii", usually translated as "light blue" and "dark blue", but to Russians they are distinct, different colors, not different shades of the same color.
All languages develop their color terms in the same way. After black and white, the third color to be named is always red, the fourth and fifth are green and yellow (in either order), the sixth is blue and the seventh brown. Welsh still doesn't have a word for brown.
|
What strikes me as interesting is that these languages did not see light as having a color. All the color words have to do with paint or surfaces (objects).
I can imagine it wasn't until the invention of televisions that we needed to know light could have different colors.
Even stained glass windows on churches would be considered paint, because it really was just a thin layer of paint that made the light change color.
In addition to the colors, English has words like "gloss", "satin" and "matte" to describe reflective qualities of light (texture). There's also funky stuff like
pearlescent and
iridescent and opalescent and metallic and other ways of 'displaying' colors.
There's also shades of each color. English has "light", "dark", "medium" and "pastel" (pale), for instance.
Even the modern discussion of what color is gets more muddy when you try to define it, for instance in my digital art programs there's five different ways of defining a color. Some use hues and saturations, others RGB or CMYK. Some are palettes, some are mixers, some are gradients.
All these traditional methods of defining color all depend on whether you're trying to make digital art, print, paint, ink, etc.
Add to this the fact that the human eye perceives color as contrasts to the colors surrounding it, rather than an absolute value (nicely demonstrated by the
chessboard optical illusion) and it all gets really confusing!
