Word Facts

This is the first post of Color Week to celebrate the 1,200th post! Thank you for your support and please share. The term "basic color category" is used to denote a word that acts as an umbrella term for a specific group of colors, such as 'red', 'yellow' and 'green', which encompass many different shades and hues. It is rare that a language would have more than about a dozen of these—English has 11 and Russian has 12 (which will be discussed during this week)—but some languages only have 2 or 3. With those languages with only a few basic color categories, the categories will almost always fall into 'light', 'dark' and then next will be 'red'. In fact, there is a noticeable trend to the order in which a language will gain each category with 'red' being the first and 'blue' usually being the last. An early explanation of this was that people could not see the color blue as thoroughly without a word for it, and pe...

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...

Following from yesterday's post  about the somewhat arbitrary nature of confirming what hues go along with what basic color categories , it might also lead to the question of why a language would have a term for a red—or any other color—at all. This is not to say that it should be strange that languages develop words for this, but that peoples will associate certain groupings of shades and hues to the same few colors in the first place, across cultures (more or less). Of course, there are also color terms outside of the basic color categories, such as English's 'vermillion', 'scarlet', and 'magenta', but these are not the most general. Indeed, consider being in a paint store where it is possible to see squares with thousands of different colors with all sorts of names such as Benjamin Moore's "Magic Potion" (a sort of violet). However, 'Magic Potion', and moreover even the umbrella term 'violet' can both exist under the umbr...

While it is fairly straightforward to translate English's 'green' to French's ' verde ' [1] as words to describe nouns, what is less easy is the words to describe colors. English has words like 'light' and 'dark' which refer to the relative amount of white or black in the mixture; because that is fairly technical, it is often (though not always) easily translated, but other modifiers like 'warm' and 'cool' are harder to pin down exactly. While reds and yellows are easy to identify as warm, and blues are cool, combinations thereof, such as various shades or purples may be more interpretive, debatably. Other languages, such as Hanunó'o have adjectives that translate to 'wet/fresh' and 'dry' to describe colors, that is simply not done in English. Furthermore, there are plenty of colors that are compounded for the effect modification, such as 'forest green'. Sometimes, these cultural differences make dir...

Though language is one of the best ways we have to communicate, because people cannot convey an entire thought-process ever, there is always some ambiguity of the meaning of signs  (words). Many—thousands if not more—shades exist that could be denoted with a basic color categories [2], so for instance, a scarlet may be different from a tan red and both are different to fire-engine red, but all could still generally be called ‘red’. One could ask then: how do people know what to assign ‘red’ to?—and more importantly for our purposes—will this differ from language-to-language? To answer the first question (without getting into biology, neurology, or much childhood’s language-acquisition), the answer is that assuming, controversially , that people can all see the same way regardless of language, people only have to get used to grouping different shades from trial-and-error when learning language from infancy. The second question is more simple answered: yes. Statistically, for exampl...

Russians blues are quite famous among cat-lovers and (some) linguists, but for a very different reason. Russian has two basic color categories  for what would both in English only be 'blue', which fascinates (some) linguists. The word 'siniy' (синий) roughly translates to the English for 'blue', but the word 'goluboy' (голубой) translates to 'light blue'. Of course, this is expressible in English, and also there will be some variation from speaker-to-speaker about what is considered which in the same way as there may be variation about how to consider any transitional color like vermillion, but some research, such as that of Jonathan Winawer, has suggested that Russian speakers are marginally faster at detecting distinctions of blues compared to English speakers. The reaction-times for seeing blues of both Russians and English-speakers evened out, however, when they were given more tasks. The experiment had a small sample-size and only looked at ...

It was mentioned during Color Week  how before English had the word ‘orange’ to describe the fruit, there was no word for the color either. This is only half true, so what would have been clearer would have been to say that before this, there was not a unique word for ‘orange’. Up until the word was borrowed ultimately from a Dravidian language via Sanskrit and Old French, people got by by saying the equivalent of ‘yellow-red’: ‘geoluhred’ in Old English. Indeed, ‘orange was only first recorded in the 16 th century (or 13 th century as a reference to the fruit), but clearly people were not partially colorblind until that point. It is a good example of how people will learn to get by regardless of limitation to communicate the same ideas. Make sure to check out the newest Word Facts Video:  https://youtu.be/Ay9PNWwcQwo Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better:  https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts .

Concerning whether or not people can see colors they have no word for, one common and fairly logical idea is that it comes down to training. While certain people like W.H.R. Rivers  had ideas that related to evolutionary biology, and thought that cultures with fewer colors were less physically advanced, a less racist response could simply come down to training; people taught to look out for more different colors could just train them selves to see more than otherwise, even if everyone is physiologically the same. This is the same explanation for how people who speak Guugu Yimithirr have an innate sense of cardinal directions . There are some flaws to this idea however. Firstly, it is possibly to see something and not have a single word to describe it, either using approximations or adjectives (such as 'light'), and also plenty of people (including English speakers) use nouns in lieu of colors all the time, such 'rose', 'violet' or 'orange'.  If we includ...

Over the last week, the posts have focused on naming things in our solar system. An obvious source is the Roman pantheon of gods, and while that may seem strange, looking at other cultures it is anything but. In languages ranging from Chinese to Hebrew to Nahuatl, rather than using the same words—even in scientific contexts as is often the case—different mythological systems will inspire naming the cosmos. Indeed, even in newer discoveries this happens. With 'Neptune', named for its blue color like the ocean and the Roman god thereof, it is 'Rahab' (רהב) in Hebrew named for a sea monster and 'Tlāloccītlalli' in Nahuatl after the Aztec rain-god. While these are newer, most cultures used mythology to inspire the names of these celestial bodies, and the two often related culturally as well. This concludes the week-long series, but you can can get them all together here .