What is color? Is it purely a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, divisible into nanometers of wavelength and lux of intensity? Or is it a vocabulary that allows us to describe the world around us? Is color art, science, or both?

Is Blue Always Blue?

In 1984, George Orwell invented ‘Newspeak,’ a language that makes alternative thinking impossible by removing the words used to describe such thought: if you have no word for ‘revolution,’ you will not start one... Newspeak was based on the idea of ‘linguistic relativism,’ the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Anthropological linguist Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Whorf, were convinced that our language constructs our reality: that we see the world through the lens of our own language and anything not encompassed by our language is – to us, at least – unthinkable. Do we live within the confines of our own linguistic reality?

Color terms have long been a favorite testing ground for proponents and opponents of linguistic relativism alike. The color vocabularies of the world’s languages are, well, colorful, and far from identical. Russian discriminates between ‘light blue’ goluboy (голубой) and ‘dark blue’ siniy (синий). Dani, an Indonesian language, has but two words for color: mili, usually associated with dark colors, and mola, usually associated with light colors (it is more complex than this, but that’s the gist). Yet despite these fun linguistic anecdotes, generally speaking, we all share the same color palette. In the late 1970s, the World Color Survey looked at 110 languages from non-industrialized countries worldwide (it is thought that color saturation in industrialized nations skews results for languages like English and French). The survey found that when all the data was plotted, six cross-linguistic peaks emerged, corresponding to English’s pink/red, brown, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Some peaks were taller than others, and some languages had color terms that did not fit into the major peaks, but the survey provided evidence that we’re all more or less looking at the same rainbow.

Photo by -sel-

Why is Blue 'Blue?'

Human eyes have two kinds of photoreceptor cells: rods and cones. Rod cells have one type of photosensitive pigment that allows us to differentiate between light and dark and helps us detect motion. Cone cells have three types of photosensitive pigments – red, green, and blue – that allow us to see in color and in detail. Together, they tell us everything they see in the visible spectrum. But biology is only half the equation. When you look at something – the sky, for instance – your rods and cones set in motion a complex psychological process that enables you to describe what you see. This is true for all stimuli, but we’ll focus on color here.

So let’s look at the sky and see what happens. Step one is perception: your rods and cones take in the color. They tell your brain that they have perceived reflected light with a wavelength of, say, 465 nanometers. Step two is categorization: you must place what you see along the visible spectrum. Your brain says this is BLUE (all caps means it is a color category, not a color itself). Step three is lexicalization: you put that category into words: “The sky is so blue today!” The lexicalization process allows for both synonymy (RED includes both crimson and carmine) and polysemy (teal falls under both the BLUE and the GREEN categories).
But what about the Russians? Or the Dani in Indonesia? We know that neither has a word for the BLUE category, but do they still have the category?

This is the fourth post in a series on English Color Etymologies. Today we are looking at the colors that come from the names of places and foreign words.

English is a colorful language. Since its birth among the tribes of Europe, English has built its color vocabulary with the wealth of words it has inherited from Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Latin, and Greek. Collected here are 172 colors that standard dictionaries (I used the American Heritage and the Random House) classify as specific color nouns (these do not, of course, include the standard ten – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, grey, white – or any Crayola inventions). This treasure of colors is broken down by etymological origin: is the color the name of a flower, an animal, or even a historical person? Some colors appear twice (when I felt two origins were sufficiently different). Others appear only once though they could certainly fit into several categories.

Ever wonder how a color got its name? Refer to the following and enjoy your new grasp on color!

PLACES

Photo by gadl

From Europe to Asia, place names have become color names. It is not surprising that Italy, birthplace of the Occidental Renaissance, contains many such places.

From Pompeii, Italy (and the color found on the walls of its houses).	From Venice, Italy.
From Burgundy, France (and the color of its wine).	From Sienna, Italy (short for: terra di sienna, ‘the color of the earth in Sienna’).
From Manilla, Philippines (and the color of manilla hemp used to make the paper).	From Champagne, France (and the color of its sparkling wine).
From Cambodia (and the resin of trees specific to southeast Asia).	From Chartreuse, France (and the green liquor made by the monks living there).
From Prussia. The dye was discovered by a man living in what is now Berlin (and was Königsberg, the Prussian capital, at the time).	From Lajward, Turkestan (where a stone of similar color was mined).
From Lajward, Turkestan, modern-day Afghanistan, (where the stone, lapis, was mined).	From Persia.
From India.	From Solferino, Italy (where a battle was fought in 1859, the same year the dye was discovered).
From Tyre, ancient Phoenicia, modern-day Lebanon.	From Magenta, Italy.
From Damascus (where the plum tree grows).	From Mocha, Yemen (a port from which coffee was exported).
From Gagas, Lycia, modern-day Turkey.

This is the third post in a series on English Color Etymologies. Today we are looking at the colors that come from the names of fabrics, gems, minerals and metals.

English is a colorful language. Since its birth among the tribes of Europe, English has built its color vocabulary with the wealth of words it has inherited from Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Latin, and Greek. Collected here are 172 colors that standard dictionaries (I used the American Heritage and the Random House) classify as specific color nouns (these do not, of course, include the standard ten – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, grey, white – or any Crayola inventions). This treasure of colors is broken down by etymological origin: is the color the name of a flower, an animal, or even a historical person? Some colors appear twice (when I felt two origins were sufficiently different). Others appear only once though they could certainly fit into several categories.

Ever wonder how a color got its name? Refer to the following and enjoy your new grasp on color!

FABRICS

Photo by snowriderguy

Various fabrics, often named for their city of origin, have become synonymous with specific colors.

From the Persian word for “rich cloth,” saquirlāt.	A coarse, woolen cloth for undergarments (no longer used).
A soft fabric of undyed wool.	A durable, German fabric used for making coats.
A coarse, green fabric similar to tweed.	A cloth formerly made in Lincoln, England.

GEMS, MINERALS, METALS

Photo by cayusa

The earth is a rich source of life, and color terminology.

This is the second post in a series on English Color Etymologies. Today we are looking at the colors that come from the names of food and drinks, fruits and vegetables, along with other miscellaneous names.

English is a colorful language. Since its birth among the tribes of Europe, English has built its color vocabulary with the wealth of words it has inherited from Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Latin, and Greek. Collected here are 172 colors that standard dictionaries (I used the American Heritage and the Random House) classify as specific color nouns (these do not, of course, include the standard ten – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, grey, white – or any Crayola inventions). This treasure of colors is broken down by etymological origin: is the color the name of a flower, an animal, or even a historical person? Some colors appear twice (when I felt two origins were sufficiently different). Others appear only once though they could certainly fit into several categories.

Ever wonder how a color got its name? Refer to the following and enjoy your new grasp on color!

FOOD AND DRINKS

Photos by roboppy & waynemah

Things we eat, from wine to liver, have become associated with color.

The fatty component of unhomogenized milk.	Coffee with milk (from the French).
A small cake (from “biscuit”).	A small cake (from the French “twice-cooked”).
A beverage made from the powder of cacao seeds.	The beverage made from roasting and grinding the seeds of the coffee plant.
Burnt sugar.	The vertebrate organ, considered edible.
A dry, red wine made in France’s Bordeaux region.	A beverage made from fermented grape juice.
Fermented, roasted, shelled, and ground seeds from the cacao plant.

FRUITS AND VEGETABLES

Photos by nidriel & targophoto

More specific than foods alone, many fruits and vegetables names have also become the name of the color of their skin.

This is the first post in a series on English Color Etymologies. Today we are looking at the colors that come from the names of animals, insects, and flowers, trees and plants.

English is a colorful language. Since its birth among the tribes of Europe, English has built its color vocabulary with the wealth of words it has inherited from Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Latin, and Greek. Collected here are 172 colors that standard dictionaries (I used the American Heritage and the Random House) classify as specific color nouns (these do not, of course, include the standard ten – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, grey, white – or any Crayola inventions). This treasure of colors is broken down by etymological origin: is the color the name of a flower, an animal, or even a historical person? Some colors appear twice (when I felt two origins were sufficiently different). Others appear only once though they could certainly fit into several categories.

Ever wonder how a color got its name? Refer to the following and enjoy your new grasp on color!

ANIMALS

Photo by fortphoto

The plumage, pelts, tusks, shells, and scales of various animals have all lent their names to colors.

Elephant tusk (made of the same material as all mammalian teeth).	Covering of a bird’s or reptile’s egg, made of calcium.
Soft leather, particularly from buffalo, elk, or oxen.	A game fish.
A large wading bird.	Rocklike structure formed of the calcareous skeletons of various, small sea creatures.
A small finch native to the Canary Islands (“the island of dogs”).	A small freshwater duck.
A young deer.	A European goat antelope.
A French mole (word now obsolete for reference to the animal).	A small, forest-dwelling, carnivorous mammal, related to the martens.
Italian word for the cuttlefish (and the ink it secretes).

INSECTS

Photo by markop

Various insects have been used for dyeing fabric over time and have thus become their own color.

Many outsiders think that modern Chinese remains a purely pictographic language, similar to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. While it is true that Chinese script began as a pictographic system, pictures do not make for a particular efficient writing system. Some pictograms do still exist (e.g., 山 ‘mountain’, 人 ‘person’), but 90% of modern Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds: they are part semantic (a portion of the character, called a radical, provides the general meaning) and part phonetic (the other portion of the character tells you how it is pronounced).

The characters for red, green, blue, and purple in Chinese are phono-semantic (all bearing the radical for silk, 系), but a few color characters are associative compounds: two or more ideographic elements combined to create another meaning. Linguists have forever debated to what extent our language affects the way we think; they have yet to draw any solid conclusions. What is commonly agreed is that when, for example, an Anglophone reads the word ‘white’, they see five letters that they have come to associate with a specific meaning – in this case, a color. This is purely abstract representation of meaning. Languages that still employ Chinese characters (including Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean) are the only modern languages whose writing system is not purely abstract. When someone reads the Chinese character for white, for example, they see a sun rising. We must wonder how these ideographic associations affect the way color is understood in cultures using Chinese characters.

Below I will introduce the six common colors whose characters are associative compounds: their character etymologies and modern Chinese associations.

The white of sunrise... by tylerc083

White

Etymology: A sun 日with a mark indicating that it is just rising = rising sun

As in many languages throughout the world, white is associated with clarity and purity in Chinese. It is also used in many expressions to indicate the clarity that is achieved through explanation: 明白 (bright + white = ‘to understand’), 自白 (self + white = ‘confessions’). Chinese also correlates white and emptiness (something akin to English’s ‘blank slate’ or ‘a white lie’): ‘white words’ (白话) are empty promises and a ‘white brain sickness’ (白痴) is stupidity.
In China, white is the traditional color of mourning (though the Western black funeral/white wedding customs are rapidly encroaching upon Chinese conventions).

The grey of ash... by jasonJT

Grey

Etymology: Fire 火that can be handled (with left 左hand) = ashes