1201: Nominal Color-Replacement (Color Week: 2) Mar 24, 2018

It was discussed in the first post of Color Week that blue is usually the last color to receive a basic color category, but it is not as simple as that. This should be clarified to mean that it is introduced consistently late, because it is very common for words for browns, oranges, and grays to come later, or before, so there is some variation to that. Often, this is because until then, speakers of a language with fewer basic color categories will use nouns or some other adjectives to fill in for those such words; it is very common for words equivalent to 'water' or 'sky' to fill the gap of 'blue', or certain flowers for other colors etc. in the same way that English speakers might describe scents by their relation to other scents, becasue there are few basic terms for scents in English. Even English's 'red'—the only color for which a Proto-Indo-European root is found—is derived etymologically from words meaning 'earth' and 'clay'. Moreover, the words for 'orange' and 'gold'—the colors—are still very obviously from 'orange' and 'gold'—the fruit and metal—the former of which English only adopted several centuries ago. This, and the fact that some languages have a spectrum not of light-and-dark but of wet-and-dry colors begins to show that people will still be able to communicate easily enough without certain terms. The effect of this, however, will be discussed tomorrow with regard to the blues in Russian.

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