This post will concern colour terms; the words used in a language used to refer to colours. A basic colour term is one that cannot be described in terms of another, but not one that contains single lexeme. However, a basic colour must be monolexemic and their use cannot be restricted (such as “blond”). For example, in English, “pink” is a basic colour term because it cannot properly be described as “light red-white”. “Mauve”, on the other hand, is not since it can be described as “pale purple”.
English has eleven basic colour terms:
According to WALS, eleven basic colour terms is a rather large inventory compared to the rest of the world’s languages: around 16% of languages have nine or more colour terms. This does not mean, however, that native speakers of different languages are able to perceive or describe only this limited number of colours, merely the linguistic filter through which they see the world. Another European (though not Indo-European) language that has a large number of basic colour terms is Hungarian.
Hungarian has an incredible 12 basic colour terms (though it’s worth noting that this is disputed amongst linguists). The same as in English except that red is divided into light and dark variants that are considered separate colours: piros and vörös. Turkish also does this (kırmızı and al) but, bizarrely, also has two basic colour terms for “white”: beyaz and ak. This distinction seems to make the least sense out of all those I have seen. Anyway, for those of you that are interested here is the complete list (with pronunciation):
vörös /ˈvørøʃ/, “dark red”
piros /ˈpiroʃ/, “light red”
narancssárga /ˈnɒrɒnt͡ʃʃaːrɡɒ/ “orange”
rózsaszín /ˈroːʒɒsiːn/, “pink”
fekete /ˈfɛkɛtɛ/, “black”
The dispute lies in the fact that, according to some research, vörös is not considered basic by all speakers of Hungarian and that it is possible to use piros in its place. But the details of that won’t be discussed here...
What I will say is that Hungarian’s (alleged) total of 12 basic colour terms is matched by Russian. Rather than divide red into light and dark colours, Russians have collectively made the arbitrary decision that light and dark blue should be considered separate colours: голубой and синий (/gəlʊˈboj/ and /ˈsʲinʲɪj/). Incidentally, голубой seems to come from the Russian word for “pigeon”, голубь, possibly because of the bird’s feathers – though, etymologically at least, this makes the Russian equivalent for “blue blood” mean “pigeon blood” (голубая кровь, /gəlʊˈbajə krofʲ/). Away from pigeons, the same distinction between light and dark blue exists in Italian with the words blu and azzurro; a distinction that probably arose during the sixteenth century when the Italian Caterina de’ Medici was queen consort of France (cf. Spanish and Portuguese’s one word for “blue”: azul).
Moving away from colour separation, a common conflation is that of blue and green. Often termed “grue”, this is a fairly common phenomenon amongst the world’s languages: until fairly recently, both Japanese and Chinese made no distinction whatsoever between what English likes to call “blue” and “green” or Czech modrý and zelený. The character for “grue” is 青. Read qīng if you’re of the Mandarin persuasion and ao if of the Japanese. Korean still, I am told, uses 푸르다 (pureuda) for both green and blue, as does Vietnamese with xanh /sɐɪŋ˧˧/. Similarly, Welsh used to make no distinction, using the word glas for both blue and green. Welsh then borrowed viridis, the Latin word for “green”, giving the modern word gwyrdd. Other Celtic languages, namely Irish and Breton, also seem to have done a similar thing.
If you watch QI you should know that the Ancient Greeks (well, Homer at least) called the sky “bronze” or rather χάλκεος (chálkeos) since they had no world for blue. Modern Greek has since stolen the French bleu and now has a word for blue: μπλε (ble).
Now to some less well-known languages:
Karajá and Lele. These two languages are not related at all: Karajá is a Macro-Gê language spoken in eastern Brazil and Lele an Afro-Asiatic language found in Chad (this Lele is not to be confused with the identically named, but unrelated, languages found in DR Congo, Guinea and New Guinea (languages with similar names also exist in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire)). Even so both languages, again arbitrarily, have decided to lump yellow, green and blue together into one word. None of the messing about with голубой and синий like in Russian.
In Canada, the 100,000 or so speakers of Cree that are left all agree that blue deserves to be a colour in its own right, but that yellow and green are similar enough to warrant cramming them into one word. This is also the case in the Komi language, spoken in north-western Russia. Though in Komi it is possible to say “green” unambiguously by putting the word for “grass” in front of the word for “yellow”.
In Pirahã, an even more exotic language, some claim that there are no colour terms (as most people would understand it) beyond a simply light and dark distinction. However, I will not dwell on Pirahã since this post is already long enough as it is and the language itself is a famously controversial topic.
Instead, to finish off with, I will say that despite the range in number and several different ways in dividing the spectrum, it seems to be true that languages develop colour terms in a certain order: starting with a light versus dark distinction, then adding red into the mix, all the way up to the eleven-way distinction of English and beyond. The division between green and blue is a landmark division as it seems to be only after this that finer distinctions such as brown, purple, pink and orange materialise. I suppose this makes a kind of sense.
Anyway, see you next time.
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