Did the Greeks have no word for blue? COLOR WORDS
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- Chase the blues away and be tickled pink by another episode of Words Unravelled. In this edition Rob and Jess explore the origins of a whole spectrum of color words (or as Rob calls them, "colour words").
🌸Does pink really exist?
💙Did the Greeks have no word for blue?
⚫️Can black actually mean white?
🐘Which spelling of grey/gray is correct?
These questions answered and many more in Words Unravelled 🌈
👂LISTEN: podfollow.com/...
or search for "Words Unravelled" wherever you get your podcasts.
==LINKS==
Rob's RUclips channel: / robwords
Jess' Useless Etymology blog: uselessetymolo...
Rob on X: x.com/robwordsyt
Jess on TikTok: tiktok.com/@jesszafarris
#etymology #wordfacts #English
I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that I’d be hooked on an etymological podcast each week. But here I am.
We're so glad you're here!
I use etymology all the time. I just go to Google and type in: etym and then the word. Example: Etym phonograph.
Same, I have almost no interest in the topic, but Rob and Jess are so engaging it is so fun to watch each week.
Makes quite a few of us! 😁
Oh I am so happy I discovered this! I've already been a fan of Rob Words for quite a while, now I get more AND the lovely Jess, too!
I’m a recent fan of your podcast- and I love how often I hear both of you say “oh! I didn’t know that.” when listening to the other.
There's always more etymological magic waiting to be discovered! :)
The Irish language also has the word "glas" for a color range. In modern Irish glas usually refers to green as in the color of grass, plants and green paint. But it can also be used for certain shades of gray/grey that the ancient Irish felt belonged with the green of nature. They also have the word uaine that refers to other shades of what we in English call green. It has a word gorm that refers to many shades of blue including blue-green. They have 2 words for red as well. Dividing what we call red into shades that fall into one or the other column. Dearg is the color of blood, while rua is the color of red hair.
Glas used to only mean green, but for example in Breton it means Blue.
Welsh added words for green (gwyrdd) and brown (brown) to break up glas/llwyd and leave them meaning just blue/grey.
@@sIightIybored The Irish word for grey is very similar to the Welsh word for that color. It's liath in Irish. Often Irish words spelled with one L are cognate with Welsh words using the double L consonant that doesn't exist in Irish.
As a digital character design artist, I can confirm that I have more words for colours than the average non-scribbler. This comes up most when I'm commissioned by non-native English speakers, but I've even broadsided those to whom it's a first language.
"Would you like something vibrant, say fuschia; or a more subdued salmon or something?"
"Uhhh... why are we beating up fish?"
As for "being yellow (bellied)" or "having a yellow streak: this is due to the practice of dogs to urinate when showing extreme levels of submission - often while crouching/cowering. A dog who did this a lot would (so the folk wisdom went) stain their bellies with a yellow streak. Thus, to say someone "is yellow bellied" or "has a yellow streak" is to say that they are a habitual, pants-wetting coward.
Zulu, Xhosa and most of South Africa's Indigenous languages didn't bother with a word for "blue" before the English showed up. Today Xhosa and Zulu speakers might use -bhelu/-bhlu to describe blues, but the usual way is to contrast the colours of natural things to specify greener of bluer shades of -luhlaza. So a green might be -luhlaza okotshani "green like grass", a blue might be -luhlaza okwesibhakabhaka "blue like the sky".
The red grape Pinot Noir ("black pine cone") mutated into the light green grape Pinot Blanc ("white cone cone") and then they crossed and we got a pinkish-orange grape that we call Pinot Gris ("grey pine cone").
Fascinating! Thank you. But I couldn't tell the difference in color between scarlet & red. And I wondered whether "diaphonous" comes from the same source as "diaper", since it refers to the look of a thin, semi-transparent fabric ("costly silk with a repeating pattern", then "very fine napkins").
@@Drabkikker Yes, "diaphanous". Thanks.
Diaper actually refers to a diamond weaving pattern, so they got that slightly wrong.
In welsh Glas means blue now but meant green originally. The clue is in the welsh for grass, which is glaswellt ( green straw).
Interesting about the orange , when I grew up here in western Sweden the old people always said brandgul (fire red) and somehow during my life it slowly changed to orange.
And about racial colors here in the 1500's in a document from the royal palace they referred to an African man as blåman ( blue man) and in southern Sweden still used as a racial slur .
When you were talking about more saturated pink like magenta and Rob said he would call it purple, I have to say when it comes to these hues I often vary between calling them pink one time and purple the other, although in my head with purple I usually think more of lavender or lilac colors and pink is more rose, rosy to me - which is where we would get back to light red somehow.
Diaper is also a very absorbent weave of textile.
I worked with a man who was red-green colourblind but I didn’t realise for about a year. We had several random plastic trays to put work in for various stages. Sometimes their position was swapped. We women would say: It’s in the red tray, or the brown tray or the burgundy tray, or the pink tray. The poor guy had no idea which was which. So I put labels on the trays.
Amber is probably also related to ember, as in burning embers
Great vid as usual. Just on magenta, i heard it came from the colour of the battlefield after the battle of Magenta
At the end of the discussion of diapers, did you hit Rob-bottom? Ahem.
It wouldn’t be an episode of words unravelled without Rob blushing. I’m glad he was able to squeeze one in just at the end, I was getting worried!
And "Blush," too, is sometimes used as a color word, and not just as a verb.
Is that what's meant by being "in the pink" ?
@@daigreatcoat44 "in the pink" usually means being in good health or very optimistic about your life/financial situation. I've read that it's first recorded use was in Romeo and Juliet (so late c1500) in the context of being at the pinnacle of something.
😂
I had a chair once which was not pink but a pale red, or 'mild' red if you like. I called it Mildred!
😅
I just love this 'cast. I'm in my 70s and can honestly say I just don't stop learning - and that relates to all things. My word education is coming solely from watching these 2 wonder people. I admire Rob and adore Jess. Hopefully there will be many more.
I'm 73 and I absolutely concur 😅
Thank you for watching! ❤
In my ideal alternate universe I have a house in which there's an old oak door that when opened reveals the pair of you sitting in comfortable armchairs sipping tea and enthusiastically and delightfully discussing the vagaries of English language etymology.
Let us know if you ever acquire such a house because that sounds lovely!
Having been a painting contractor, people tend to have no absolute sense of color. Picking some colors, notably yellows, will surprise them on how it looks in masse rather than a paint color chip.
An anecdote from a building engineer: The architect had specified that the interior walls of the building (school) would be blue. So the paint master developed several blues and painted small patches of the wall with them for the architect to select. So the architect came in and selected the color he wanted and draw a circle around it. After the architect had gone the building engineer asked the paint master if he could produce the required amount of that color paint. He answered that he could not, but he could make batch that was as close to it that it was not anywhere the non-selected hues and first thing he would do would be paint the selected color patch over with the new one.
My folks refinished a basement room decades ago, from blue to what we all thought was a sort of tangerine hue...except that on the whole wall it was more a quite hideous near-fluorescent peach! Went for a pale tan instead. Much nicer.
@@stevetournay6103 It took a lot of practice to be able to visualize what a building would look like from a paint sample chip.
I started painting a stucco ramada in my back yard. Light yellow/tan. Sun came out from behind a cloud and it turned bright orange.
Especially given Rob's shirt, I was surprised that you didn't comment on how brown is a word used to describe a dark orange. While I think most English speakers would recognize pink as being a shade of red, as well as being a color in its own right, I suspect that most would not naturally think of brown and orange being used to describe two shades of the same color.
While this is in a sense true. If you picked an archetypal brown you could describe it as a dark orange. But brown is more of a category of association it includes some very pale almost grey objects and colours that approach black that are shifted in any direction except blue.
Makes me think of brawny. The Germanic word is Braun, etc...
White used to be written with the initial hw in Middle English which is hvit in Norwegian Bokmål. It's funny you mentioned The four humours of Galen , a Greek living in Roman times. I had a Mexican classmate who kept saying "yellow" jello.
Brown is a shade. Pink is a _tint._
I, too, enjoy Technology Connections
It's cute when Rob gets embarrassed by naughty topics. And Jess is completely fine with it. :D
"Slang words for sex" is totally a future video. Think about that.
Especially for this video, Rob being red-faced is fun.
Writing a book on gross/scary/naughty/nefarious word origins has effectively desensitized me to all of the above. 😆 - JZ
Well. Rob is English
I've heard an alternate theory that when the Ancient Greeks referred to the sky as bronze, they were referring to the metal in it's oxidized state which is a blue/green colour
That makes more sense.
Or... Sunrise and sunset.
Could this be a reference to temperature?
Metals can be cold to the touch, so maybe Homer was saying “the sky looks how it looks when the air is crisp and cool outside”?
Turquoise comes from French and is a reference to a dye that originally came from Turkey. Hence the name for that color.
My favourite colour😍.
Turquoise is a semiprecious stone rather than a dye.
@@brettevill9055 Yes, but did the name of the dye come from the stone, or did the name of the stone come from the dye?
@@johnsantos1738 The name of the stone came from the name of the country it was imported from.
Diaper is the name of a weaving pattern. The fabric thus produced is textured and especially absorbent, so it has been used as nappies for a baby's bottom, but I understand that diaper fabric has also been used for towels, table napkins, etc. It makes sense that it could easily be also used as a way to introduce colour variation (pattern) in the cloth.
I saw a video about how, in the 16th/17th century, the term 'diaper cloth' was also used a sanitary napkin by women because of the tight weave and absorbency it provided.
Not necessarily a Weaving pattern, but the diamond pattern itself. Very old window panes which were cut into diamond shapes are referred to as a diaper pattern. Also, regarding baby diapers, they used to be folded into a triangle shape before being pinned in place, so a sort of diamond shape.
Aha, I wondered when someone would bring up 'nappie'.
In regards to a yellow streak, I always heard it as 'a yellow streak down your back' meaning someone was cowardly. Not sure where that came from, but I don't hear it much anymore.
Yeah, was thinking the same thing.
In old folk medicine, courage was associated with the liver. Liver disease generally produces jaundice, which gives a distinct yellow hue to skin and eyes, and so therefore cowardice became associated with the same condition. Thus we get "yellow streak", "yellow bellied" and "lily livered" to indicate a lack of courage.
Or perhaps it's associated with the colour of urine as someone who is afraid can sometimes wet themselves
My grandmother used to use it to mean coward
I'm surprised Jess didn't say that Rob would be a yellow streak riding that bike!
These RUclips videos are excellent and the only ones where reading the comments/replies is as interesting as the video itself! I'm so glad I found this channel.
Blue sea? I come from Blackpool, home of 7 miles of sandy beaches. Our sea, therefore, is sort of browny- grey or greyish- brown depending on the wind.
Then you must look at some pictures of the ocean around any number of South Sea Islands. You’ll find waters of some of the most beautiful shades of blue you have ever seen.
I always thought "bleak" meant pale. It's probably because in Afrikaans, my mother tongue, "bleek" means pale, typically used for pale skin when someone isn't well.
No bleak means something similar in English as well, pale, pallid. Some cases in some dialects are homographs with black in old English, but the strong declensions evolve into bleach and the weak into bleak.
I think if I really had to define how I've thought of it, it means something like colourless, without vibrancy. I'm not sure how the dictionaries describe it, but I guess that reflects how it can be associated with British winters in the song, as well as white or black/dark. 🤔
(Edit: I'm Aussie, so winters down here are when everything finally gets some rain and becomes lush and green...)
I thought bleak meant devoid of colour or interesting features. As in bleak landscape….dull.
I always associated the word with a kind of middle-dark grey or other colours associatef with 'life-lessness', but mostly 'bleak' for me describes a colour palette more than a single hue.
@@AutoReport1Possibly due to both tongues being Germanic languages.?
I used to make Barbie dolls while I worked at Mattel. We had well over 100 Barbie “pinks” we used across the line of Barbie products. As a standard, manufacturers rely on the Pantone color scales where a number is assigned to a color.
British artist Stuart Semple's FREETONE system has taken off over the last couple of years, after a 2022 licensing dispute between Pantone and Adobe led to Pantone charging Photoshop users $15/month for access to their colorspace.
A weird one in Irish. If you're of dark skin, rather than description being 'black' as in many other languages, in Irish we use the word for 'blue'. An Fear Gorm ("The Man Blue", directly translated).
Could that go back to pictish times? The picts were famously heavily tattoed.
"Gorm" also referred to dark, but not red, colours more generally. Is not really "blue" when it comes to skin colour, but "dark". "Gorm" covers a slightly darker part of yhe spectrum than "blue" does in English.
@@HotelPapa100Unlikely.
@@talideon as an Irishman (but not fluent speaker), I never knew that! Great insight. Blueness is so often used to make scenes in movies or design 'cool', so I can totally see that. I wonder if there's another version for 'warm'? Dearg?
The other thing is if you directly translated "the black man", you get "an fear dubh", which actually means the devil 🫤
As a Lincolnshire native I am a yellow belly. I was taught at school that 'yellow streak' referred to the cummerbund worn by redcoats of the Lincolnshire regiment during the independence unpleasantness.
I've always gone along with the no-word-for-orange theory because of common animal names like red fox and red kite. People with red-fox-coloured hair are called ginger, but actual ginger is not that colour at all...
Fellow Lincolnshire native here. I was about to comment about this but you beat me to it!
Fascinating info! Sounds plausible. Hope it's true! Robin Red-Breast is another common creature that is actually very orange breasted.
Ginger preserved in sugar (crystallised ginger)is that 'ginger' orange colour. It's possibly how most people saw it in everyday life especially if it was imported instead of grown locally.
@@niamhfox9559 But even crystallised ginger, which I used to buy for my grandmother, is more of a deep yellow than the russet associated with ginger hair.
@@RabidJohn I've thought it more related to the flower colour of the ginger plant.
Also on the word: "Pink". In Danish the word for pink as in a not specific hue is "lyserød" which litteraly means "light red". It's only fairly resently that we've started to use "pink" to refer to a specific colour
The opposite also applies. Brown and orange are actually the same color, in dark and light versions, but we use two different names for them, similar to red and pink, which are also two names for the same color in dark and light versions.
@@Manigo1743 In Swedish another word for orange is "fire yellow" (brandgul) Orange is a fairly new word in Swedish.
It is interesting to me that when you speak of the word "maroon" and you pronounce it to rhyme it with "moon," that it sounds very odd to me. I am Australian and grew up in the state of Queensland. Queensland was named for Queen Victoria. We already had a Victoria so they went with Queensland. The state colour is "maroon," because it was the colour associated with the queen. However, we still pronounce it the way they would have in that period which is to rhyme with "bone," which is reminiscent of the French pronunciation for the word from which it comes. It is also the colour of our state Football (Rugby League) team. And you can only say that "maroon (marone)." Anyone that says it the other way is just wrong.
I'm hearing you cobber. You're marooned on the aerosol of the earth!😅
A thought I had last summer (NZ): - "Green: - The beauty of the green forest is the result of us seeing what the plants don't want. They suck up all the sun's light except green. That's what we see, plant rejects." 🙂
@@Drabkikker LOL. Tho' sometimes it's more "These are mine, sod off!".
I always was under the impression that red is so important for us because we needed to distinguish the color of edible fruits against green as we evolved. It makes sense how you both pointed out blood is important to recognize as well!
Your pronunciation of maroon is very interesting to me. In Australia it has the same final vowel as in "moan". And fortuitously, this episode has come out the same day as one of Australia's biggest annual domestic sporting events, a competition between the Queensland "Maroons" and the NSW "Blues".
Yes. Sydneysider here. My high school uniform was maroon, but pronounced Marroan. It already had that pronunciation when I enrolled in the school. Everyone said marroan, just like everyone said ‘forrad’ for forehead.
That's why I always spelled it wrong as a kid, 'marone'. Also, I've only ever heard Australians pronounce Taupe as torp (as in torpedo).
I will debate this, magenta is neither pink nor purple, it’s magenta.
I'm curious about your writing process. It often seems like one of you is surprised by something the other says, and not just during the parts where you seem to be ad libbing. Like, this time, Rob seems to genuinely react to you saying "orange you glad." That wouldn't seem to happen if he had the script in front of him.
So I'm curious what your scripting process actually looks like. Do you each script different parts? Then how do you get them to combine? Do you also do outlines for the stuff where you seem to be reacting?
It's something I've not heard in any other podcast. Either they are clearly all just working from an outline, or they just ad lib the whole time.
Good question!
Usually a few days before we record, we kick around a few thematic ideas. For this episode, I pitched four ideas, and Rob selected colo(u)r words. That's pretty much the extent of our planning together.
I pull my past research into a notes document, show up for the recording, and we spend about 5-10 minutes talking through what info we brought and who's most excited about what.
Then we riff and see where it goes!
At the end, we record the introduction based on what we've discussed in the rest of the conversation. It's usually made up on the fly, though sometimes it requires a few takes to get it right.
It's honestly so easy to talk with Rob about these things, and I learn something new every time! - JZ
@@WordsUnravelled Oh. So when you talk about having written stuff, you're talking about the stuff your past research and putting it in a document.
That is more of an outline, the way I think of it.
@@WordsUnravelled
Thanks so much for sharing your methods!
They obviously work and give you your genuine spontaneity!
For men vs. women: We always say in my family that Dad was born with an eight-pack of crayons, while we girls were born with the "64-pack with the little sharpener"!
One of the genes for color recognition is on the X-chromosome. Men necessarily only get one of those. For many women they get two identical versions, but some women get two slightly different versions that code for slightly different wavelengths, and thus they have a finer perception of color differences, like a sieve with smaller apertures in the mesh
Crayons are the only reason anyone knows what "burnt umber" is (a great color, BTW).
That's really interesting, @thomasmacdiarmid8251. And it makes a lot of sense too. As far as I know most (if not all) cases of tetrachromacy (four colour receptors instead of the usual three) that have been identified have been in women. Probably one of those evolutionary things that was beneficial for the survival of offspring, or something.
And, most genetic colorblindness occurs in men. About 8-10% of men have some degree of the condition.
@@mattheffron391 yeah, with two X chromosomes, a woman who inherits one colorblindness gene usually has a good backup gene.
Tane is from "Tanner" a verb from French (Occitanie) originally it means Beating animal skins to soften them, in doing so the softened skins become brown (leather). In French Tane (tanning) is only used for beaten skins that have become brown, skins browned by the action of the sun are called Bronzé (Tanning = Bronzage). From bronze metal. Tanning (Tannage) is used only when skins turned brown harmefully (beaten) and Bronzage is used for skins turned brown under the action of sun softly and with pleasure.(on the beach for example).
"Two ships were crossing the sea, one carrying blue paint, one carrying red paint. Unfortunately they collided, and both crews were marooned." There's a certain sordid history in my past concerning this joke, which involved one person being constrained by their job to repeat it three times. In fact, I have a truly marvellous recantation of the story which this comment is too small to contain...
I vaguely remember hearing about an experiment where objects of different shades of blue, cyan, and green were presented to participants, and they were asked to group them into _two_ groups by colour. Apparently men were more likely to group cyan with the blues, and women more likely to see it as green. Or it might have been a different experiment that came to that same conclusion.
I don't know how true it is, and I haven't been able to track down that study since. But I found it really interesting.
I think everyone sees Cyan as blue. I could buy Teal. I have several shirts that I think are Blue and my wife insists are green.
Well, cyanotic describes blue or purplish skin from a medical condition.
Yellow-bellied might imply cowardly, but in Australia we have a yellow-bellied black snake. Nobody calls them cowardly.
You missed a US UK difference in traffic lights, I thought it was coming when you spoke about yellow and amber. US yellow light, UK amber!
When Rob mentioned the trend to put teal with orange, I half expected the conversation to turn immediately to his shirt pattern. ;-)
I wouldnt say Swarthy had overtones of colourism. A very very recent idea. But the related, esp in UK, classism. An outdoor worker like a peasant farmer, farm labourer, traveller. Pirate. That sort of person. Not 'one of us' sort of thing.
I think that's right. I've always taken the word to mean "weather-beaten", and so referring to people who work outdoors.
Yes but in more recent history it seems to be mainly used for Middle Eastern people in a derogatory way that signalled inherent untrustworthiness based on skin colour.
C'mon, colors are made of three components: Hue, Tone, and Saturation. Therefore, a "bright" pink is just a red with low tone and high saturation.
I am from Coventry in the UK and I always understood that the phrase 'true blue' came from 'true as Coventry blue' because Coventry was a centre of the wool dyeing trade in mediaeval times and the blue they used did not fade or run easily - there are records of wool merchants sending wool from all over western Europe to Coventry to have it dyed. So as you had Venice Red or Lincoln Green, you had Coventry Blue. It was not sky blue, but more of a royal blue.
To us Aussies 'true blue' is generally taken to mean as loyal to Australia as you can get.
This from the Australian National University - "Very genuine, very loyal; expressing Australian values; Australian. This derives from a British English sense of true blue, recorded from the 17th century with the meaning 'faithful, staunch, unwavering in one's commitments or principles; extremely loyal'
Interestingly, the term 'dyed in the wool' has similar connotations here.
Very infomative, much deeper sujbect than I figured, but your langage Jees and Rob......so colourful1!
Pink is "vaaleanpunainen" in Finnish and literally means "light red".
But in Finnish you can also use "pinkki". The younger you are the more likely you are to separate light red from pink even in Finland.
In Irish it is Bándearg (=white-red).
As an artist I love this. We as humans give everything a name or word as an identifier. I found that energetically colors all are a manifestation of what we call “ white/bright/ lucid..etc”. If you look through a prism all shades that humans can see and identify with our limited eyesight are present. To be there are so many colors that our human eyes can not see nor perceive energetically. Hence the ability to sense or see auras which are the other colors that most humans cannot see. All hues meld together so we call it white ish but really there is no true boundary between any colors, they all blend together when their frequency and wavelengths are united. It should be seen in experiments in astrophysics, and easily in chemistry. Metaphysics has possibly no way of proving this right now but we maybe it is out there just not available to the mass public yet. Excellent video thank you 🙏 🩵💙🧡❤️💜❤️💚🤍💛♾️
I recall in mj predip course long ago the tutor asked each of us to look in a dark corner of a box and say what we saw. I got through to about the 6th when he said ' hm. Trust you.' I didnt know what he meant but we 'see' reflected light so that changes according to the light at each tiny focal point. 😅
Human minds needs categories so it can work. Thus all continous phenomens are quantified in human mind. Light-dark, various color hues, time, lengths etc.
I am also an artist, and very much a colorist. What frustrates me is the inability to describe the hundreds of colors that I've seen while under the influence of LSD. Apparently our eyes are only capable of seeing that hair fine line of the magnetic spectrum that we call visible light, but our brain can "see" further to either side of it. This amazed me, and it frustrates me to no end not being able to describe them. There is no way to compare them with anything. It would be like trying to say that blue is kind of like red or yellow. These colors aren't kind of like anything! And what really drives me nuts is that l can still, after more than 50 years, see them vividly in my mind's eye!
Speaking of pink 🌸, is the flower called pink because the edges look like they have been 'pinked' (the ragged edges of the petals) or did the term pink to refer to a saw-toothed edge on fabric and similar come from the edged of the pink flower's petals?
Didn't bald mean white at one time?
Hence the Bald Eagle which doesn't have a head like a vulture with no feathers but has a head of white plumage.
Thank you for getting the info on the Ancient Greek word for blue correct. You wouldn’t believe how many people I have fought with on the internet about Greeks and blue lol
Magenta was originally coined in honour of the French Zouaves who fought at the battle of Magenta in 1859. It was used to describe the colour of their pantaloons. Look at any period artwork of a Zouave and the pants are deep red.
As for Homer's "wine dark sea", RUclipsr Metatron did a video about that, showing images of the Mediterranean at sunset and it is, indeed, the colour of a wine, reflecting the "red sky at night, sailor's delight".
Why would someone accept Homer as an authority on ancient Greek color terminology when he was traditionally regarded as being blind?
@@johnsantos1738Because "Homer" wasn't one person. There's certainly a historic Homer, but they were somebody who had learned older stories. Not so the Homeric epics as they are transcribed can be tied to a single storyteller. Also, even if Homer was blind, there's no reason why they couldn't have learned that description from whoever relayed the story to them.
That’s interesting about the colour of the Zouaves’ trousers as I always thought the word magenta was coined for the colour resulting from blood soaking into the blue uniforms of the wounded and dead French troops, again at the battle of Magenta.
Indigo has been shifted in its place in the spectrum over the centuries. Newton for example would have thought our unfaded *blue* jeans were indigo which if you look at truly indigo died products makes sense. Infact to Newton blue was closer to a cyan sky blue rather than the deeper, darker indigo. But over time indigo became less prevalent as a dye and its place in the color wheel got more purple.
Additionally the flowers called pinks led to the phrase of Pinking which is to cut an edge to give a similar finish to the flower.
Indigo basically was introduced into the rainbow to complete it to seven colours, which is considered a magical number. So it makes sense that it is shifted in the colour wheel to give it a more distinct hue.
I think it's the other way around: the flower is called "pink" because of the serrated edges.
@@drs-xj3pb nah man. Pinks had the edges so finished pinking refered to the finish that resembled them. Later the color pinks had gave its name to pink in general.
Diaper is also a word for the pattern of brick on buildings. I learned that in an episode of Time Team.
The word for blue in Portuguese is "Azul" and it (still) means "good morning" in Amazigh (from which this word comes from)
Bright good morning with the sky on
One I think you missed is vermilon, vermelho in Portuguese, which means red. Middle English vermilioun, borrowed from Anglo-French vermeilloun, from vermeil "bright red, red color" (going back to Late Latin vermiculus "bright red color (obtained from kermes)," going back to Latin, "insect larva, grub," from vermis "worm" + -culus, diminutive suffix) + -on, diminutive or particularizing suffix, going back to Latin -ō, -ōn-, suffix of persons with a prominent feature.
That's a great one
Have either of you considered the topic of how painters created colors to paint with? Black was often from burnt material, so soot mixed with a binder like egg yolk or oil. Yellow and red came from clays that had iron oxide. White was often chalk. Most Egyptian painting was done with just these colors. Blues and greens came from metals and were rarer. One - Lapis - was a gemstone.
I've been watching "pink" evolve within my lifetime. When I was a kid (1980s) nobody ever used it for any shade of purple like magenta. That somehow got started with most people not realizing it or acknowledging it for years. Now we've finally arrived at this video, which is the first place I've seen anybody other than me consciously explicitly state that some things that were being called "pink" are purple.
That must have predated _Barbie_ for which it is hard to imagine her having anything other than pink clothes.
@@wallykramer7566 The color they showed to illustrate Barbie pink did not look Barbie pink to me at all. I think of Barbie pink as the color of Pepto-Bismol.
Technically, magenta is cannot be a purple because purple is a mix of red and blue. You can not mix red and blue to make magenta, it's actually a primary colour, which is why your printer uses it along with cyan and yellow. The cymk system of colour mixing is far more accurate in mixing than the old system of red blue and yellow that painters used to use. I'm an artist and would never refer to magenta as a purple. A lot of artists have moved to using the cymk system as it creates cleaner, less muted mixes.
I know a few people who use "pinkle" as the name for the pinkish-purple/pastel magenta that is used as one of the card colors in the Ticket To Ride board games.
I believe the cards are officially considered "purple", according to the manufacturer, but they sure look pink to me!
The verb "pink" dates back to 1300 meaning "pierce, stab, make holes in". As a former graphic designer, this was something I had learned in my color theory class and for some reason has stuck with me for years.
My father, a tailor, had a device called "pinking shears". It (they?) was like a pair of scissors with blades which left the cloth with a saw-toothed edge.
Looking at the photo of the (flower) pink, you can see that the edges of the petals are definitely saw-toothed at the edges, so to pink (verb) meant to cut the edges of cloth to prevent fraying with a pinking iron hit with a hammer to cut the cloth (obviously before pinking shears).
@@joannshupe9333 Thanks for that - very interesting. I never knew that pinking is done to prevent fraying - always assumed it was purely decorative.
@@daigreatcoat44 Specifically it is done to disrupt the outermost threads parallel to the cut. If you can't pull them out contiguously, the short pieces of thread coming out matter much less.
Thanks very much -I'm getting enough information to enable me to take up my father's career!
Yellow Belly is a reference to reptiles specifically lizards. The full phrase is, Yellow Belled Lizard and is a comment on how lizards scamper off when approached and the fact that most reptiles have yellow bellies. This may also explain a yellow streak because often the belly of reptiles isn't all yellow but rather streaks of yellow on each side of the belly. Also someone with a yellow streak my have the propensity of cowardness but have not yet acted on it.
In England a yellowbelly (or yeller belly) is or was a person from Lincolnshire. Reason for this is disputed.
One possible explanation is from a uniform that a Lincolnshire regiment wore
The people in the town of Oudewater in the Netherlands are also called 'Yellowbellies' or 'Geelbuiken', because there used to be many rope makers and those men got yellow bellies because of their work.
@@cjchamu1I've also heard that mustard has been grown in south of Lincolnshire since the late 18th century. The pollen coated the front of farm workers clothes.
I've always heard the insult as "yellow bellied sap sucker" which is actually a kind of woodpecker that makes a high pitched screech. So not just cowardly but also flighty, and parasitic.
I love how English-speaking linguists often refer to the colexification of green and blue in languages like Japanese with the portmanteau, "grue".
Let’s talk about Physics here ! I think a lot of questions or tricky points can find an answer if we don’t forget that colours are light, and light is a wave that can be diffracted in a mixture of wavelenghts combined in a continuous spectrum. Basically a colour is made from the light wavelengths that are reflected (not absorbed) by an object or a material and thus that can reach our eyes. The continuous spectrum of wavelengths (of which we can see a part in a rainbow with our human eyes when diffracted by rain drops) explains quite well the continuous spectrum of words used to describe colors all over the world and history. It also explains the weird question of blue colour. Think about it, blue colour is extremely rare in nature, generally more related to purple or lavander, except of course for sky and sea, which basically are made from material without any colour ! Air and water are indeed completely transparent (meaning the light can go through and reach our eyes entirely). The colour of the sky is due to the filtering of sunlight by the atmosphere, and can range from white to darkest grey through an infinite palette of blue/green, whereas the colour of the sea is basically the reflection of the sky colour on the water.
There were four humours: blood (-> sanguine, from Latin), bile (->choleric, from Greek), phlegm (-> phlegmatic, from Greek), and black bile (>-melancholy, from Greek: Balck + bile)
As for that greyish bear, the scientific name name can be scary: Ursus arctos horribilis (dreadful bear bear).
Never mind that in physics neither black or white are colours (whether you get to them by mixing light or pigments).
I suppose you could argue Thai still doesn't have a word for blue, it's referenced as "si fa" literally just "sky-colored". Archaically, the Thai word for green was used for blue (apparently).
In Afrikaans the colours are as follows
Black - swart
White - wit
Yellow - geel
red - rooi
Blue - blou
Green - groen
grey - grys
brown - bruin
I was amazed to see (in a video) that South African pumpkins are not orange, as they always are in the US.
What is the word for orange in Afrikaans?
@@kennethflorek8532 oranje
to no surprise these look very close to their Dutch or German equivalents.
Swartznegger...I'll be black.
In Japanese, Green is midori and blue is ao, but a green traffic light is always referred to as ao (blue)
I had heard that the actual traffic light in Japan is what I, as an American, would call blue. Is that true?
@@alboyer6 They used to be green (in our sense), but because they were called ao (blue/green), the government mandated they be changed to the bluest possible green (to avoid controversy regarding what color to call them), and so they are truly blue.
There's some history involved, so this isn't precisely the case. Ao 青 has always referred to both blue AND green ("grue"), hence ao-ringo "green apple", ao-dake "green bamboo", ao-yasai "green vegetables", and so many more. Midori originally meant "freshness," and over time developed as precisely "green," replacing part of the range of the word ao (but not in (many?) existing compounds and phrases).
@@petermsiegel573 I noticed the difference when I travelled there! Thanks for that info.
I've heard that aoi can mean blue (as in sky) or green (as the sea sometimes). Thus it can refer to some greens as well as many blues. The Japanese language has a great many words for different colours, most of which Japanese people no longer use, because of their association with the now hated class system of the past. It seems very sad to me.
You two do so well together and this podcast is such fun! I really hope that it will continue for a long time!
In greek, there is the world Πορφυρογέννητος/Porphyrogennitos which means "purple born" and it comes to indicate that you are part of the byzantine royal family.
Lately, as I drive around the city I live in, I have been paying more attention than formerly to the colors of automobiles. The designers of automobile paint seem to be rebelling a bit against the plague of black and white vehicles that proliferated from about 2010 to 2020. I am seeing many shades of blue and brown along with a smattering of yellows, greens and an occasional pink. The least pleasing, but psychologically interesting, is a profusion of different grays. It’s as if some people, too accustomed to black and white, can’t venture out into the other dimensions of color space.
ah, yes, but when will they have patterns, as in zebra, leopard, plaid, paisley, checkaboard etc etc?
When I was in Portugal, I saw a sign "Pare ao sinal vermelho" at IIRR a railroad crossing. The Portuguese cognate of "rojo" is "roxo", which is "purple", and the sense "red" was replaced with a cognate of "vermilion". Both Spanish "rojo" and French "rouge" are cognate with English "red", but descend from different Latin words.
We associate blue with boys and pink with girls. This is relatively modern. Blue was associated with females as it was the pigment found in icons of the Virgin Mary. It was the most expensive pigment so she was honoured with it's use. It still remains with "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" for brides. Red was the male colour, still associated with fox hunting also in pre 20th Cent. army uniforms. Before synthetic dyes red quickly faded to pink. Not sure when or why this swapped around. Victorian?
Many comment that they never expected to be listening to an etymology discussion, but I somehow know I was supposed to be here! As a nerd, I found my society... :)
In Ukrainian, and for that matter in most other Slavic languages, the word for red “червоний” (reads “chervony”) also comes from the name of an insect that was used for making the red dye, the word “червець” (“chervec”) describes this insect in a form of a worm. I believe these words are cognates with the English word “crimson”.
Edit: formatting
Grey as in Earl Grey.
That may reinforce the e-spelling in Britain.
So Elektra from Greek mythology, her name meant “amber,” I guess? That’s a good fact.
28:35 also “robin redbreast” even though they’re most definitely orange
Research has discovered that the more words/names for colors a person has learned, the more distinctions in color a person is able to perceive.
There was an Australian tv programme “Kath and Kim” which I guess was a play on kith and kin.
Also in Australia and NZ one of the home hardware shops has a range of kit set kitchens called “Kitchen Kaboodle”!
I feel there's a connection between yellow and glow, which could explain why it once referred to bright colours.
The word “vegetable” comes from the color green in Hebrew and Arabic, respectively. In Hebrew the words for red, earth and man share the same root ADM. The Israeli flag was inspired by the tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl, parts of which were historically dyed using the Purpura snail. When a person hasn’t the purest reputation, it is said of them that they are “not a tallit made of all tkhelet”. Tkhelet being the single word for light blue in Hebrew. (Possibly a cousin of “takhlil” meaning reddish).
I like the comfortable to and fro between you both. Love these and Robs words. Always new info.
This is gonna be marked off topic but I always get kinda mad when people say that counting the centuries is confusing. It's just cause no one ever explains it properly
Yeah, if you try to remember "oh it's always somehow one number off" yeah, that *is* confusing. But it's actually super logical. You count the centuries from 0 like blocks from the ground. First one's the one with two digits, then the second on top with the 1 first. And so on. The same way you are, say, 23 years old but live in your 24th year.
Rant over :D
A bright spot on the spectrum of podcasts
I can tell you where the race colours come from. They come from old Greek Ideas of the corners of the world. Originally they were Black for North, Yellow for East, Red for South and White for West.
They can be seen on modern map with the Black Sea and Red Sea. The Persian golf was the Yellow Sea, and the Western Mediterranean was the White Sea.
With the discovery of America the colours swapped a bit, Yellow stayed East, Black went South, Red went west and White went North. And so they also became used for the races that inhabited the continents in those directions seen from the Mediterranean.
Swart is the Afrikaans word for black as well and yellow is geel.
Yes, because they are Germanic words found in a Germanic language.
Similar in Low German and even standard German
You mention "swart" and I thought I had never seen the word before apart from "swarthy," but not one day after seeing this video I'm reading the Lord of the Rings and some of the orcs are described as "swart." I've read this book several times before and probably just skipped right over the word but the second I learn its meaning I encounter it.
Yay new episode! 🎉💜
🥈
Rob, I found it interesting that when you described pink you mentioned it was red with a touch of white, theses are the colours you mix in art to make pink. Is your work or your background something to do with art? Scarlet brings an interesting (or boring) thing that I know, in Tutbury, Derbyshir, there are ancient records of criminal trials that mention a certain Will Scathlock. Apparently scathlock is a medieval or maybe a Middle English word for Scarlet, so they think that this Will Scathlock is Will Scarlet from the Robin Hood stories.
I always thought that Bugs Bunny's insult, "What a maroon" was simply a way that they could have him use the word "moron" on children's television and get around the censors.
Always assumed referred back to the communities of fugitive slaves, who mixed with native peoples, in and around the Caribbean, who were known as Maroons. They were considered to be beyond the Pale, so thought was a, these days obviously racially inappropriate, way of describing a feral or uncivilised person
Such nonsense...any child raised in Buffalo knows the sky is gray.
Pink is a tint of red.
Magenta, is magenta.
“Barbie Pink” looks to me like a shade of magenta.
I think Barbie pink is closer to cerise. It's slightly more yellow than true magenta.
I've been learning to paint with watercolour and there generally I've found "Opera pink" is the closest to "Barbie pink". I wonder why it's called "Opera pink"...if that has some other meaning than what seems to be the obvious. I'll have to Google it.
At least twice in this episode, Jess used the word 'clock' to mean something along the lines of 'recognition' or 'understanding'. It is a fairly rare usage in my experience. Could that be further explained - origin, the boundaries of meaning, etc.?
When Jess said that many women distinguish more colours than many men, my first thought was of the plethora of subtle variations of colour found in nail varnish.
ETA: 19:58 - 'Fuscia' American spelling or misspelling? Surely, it should be 'Fuchsia'!
That's taking about 'tetrachromacy', having 4 colour receptors instead of 3. All of the known tetrachromats are women. They can see dozens to hundreds of times more colours than the rest of us.
@@thekaxmax I hear that it's mostly in the red end of the spectrum where they get the advantage.
It's not just a misspelling. It starts with a mispronounciation. Fuchs, after all, is close to fox. I hate that English forces a "sh" sound in there.
@@androgenoide it's a duplicated red cone, yup.
Orange. When I grew up, we here in Sweden often called that color Brandgul. Meaning Fire Yellow. Seems to have fallen out of fashion now, though.
Yellow bellies are people from Lincolnshire. There are loads of explanations as to why this might be. I was told in school that it comes from the yellow sashes worn by the Lincolnshire regiment during the Civil War.
I am not saying you are wrong, but as a sailor, I have always understood the poop deck as the stern (and uppermost) deck, while the front or bow is referred to as the head(s) of the ship. On boats the main function of the head is still used as its name: the toilet. Men would go forward to the heads, rightly afore (wink) the figure-HEAD, to relieve themselves. The head is still the toilet on any ship or boat.
The poop deck does in fact come from Latin via French, if Wiki is to be believed.
'Cat out of the bag' was just sitting there waiting for you to elaborate.