Italian does indeed distinguish between light blue and dark blue. There are two words for light blue: _azzurro_ and _celeste_. _Celeste_ means "belonging to the sky".
"light blue" and "dark blue" don't seem quite appropriate as descriptions for the difference between these colors; I think that the main difference is that of hue (azurro/голубой being between blu/синий and green); the fact that the saturated versions of these colors differ in lightness is accidental.
@@locoluis1978 It's not accident. Dark and light blue does make some sense, because different hues are associated with different luminescence by the brain. Our retina are more sensitive to colors more to the center of the specter (yellow, green and cyan) than the extremes (blue, violet and red). So celest, which is a hue closer to cyan, is naturally more "lighter/brigher" than azure. They not only have different amount of chroma, they have different luminescence. Here is an example: This celeste: 00bfff And this blue: 00004a They have both the same amount of chroma and max saturation, but the celest has greater luminosity/value, buy a lot. In other words, you can never get a color from the celest hue and get a darker color than a one from the azure hue if they have the same amount of saturation and chroma. That is why it makes sense to call one dark and the other light. In contrast, you have this yellow and this aquamarine: ffe000; 00ff73. They have the same chroma, saturation value and luminosity. They truly only differ in hue. That is because they are about the same but opposed distance from the peak of retina's color sensitivity.
We also say celeste in spanish but most people will tell you it's a shade of azul (blue) Then there's turqoise, I'm sure depending on who you ask they would tell you it's either a shade ofblue or a shade of green We could also all say cyan which I think is becoming more common
I have seen several videos on this topic, and what is never mentioned is that there are also languages without fixed color terms. One example is Malecu (aka Guatuso) spoken in Costa Rica, where the way to describe a color is comparing it to an animal, plant or object. For instance, for something that is green, they could describe it as "grass-like" or "leaf-like", but there is no fixed comparison for each color, so it depends on the speaker and the exact shade of the color. The texture is actually also incorporated in the comparison, so something brown and hairy could be compared to a brown hairy animal, but never to dirt or bark.
i think colors in all languages probably came off just like that, since most colors have derived origin. But nowadays, for example in my language when more specific colors are needed to specify people employ this kind of approach
Before I was 4 or 5, I was somehow taught to differentiate/name “light blue” and “dark blue” in English and have since always viewed them as two colors.
Because of the help of this video, my conlang uses these colors: 1. Ihlun (meaning "shimmer of light"): White, yellow. 2. Kuilasa (meaning "soil"): Red, orange, brown. 3. Tem (meaning "grass"): Green. 4. Ēloatso (Meaning "night"): Black, grey, blue, purple.
I feel like 'teal', as an intermediate between blue and green, might become a fundamental color in the future. The addition of orange as an intermediate between red and yellow is very recent after all. Also I feel like the experiments that asks for speakers of different languages to class different colors is not necessarily any evidence for the Sappir-Whorf hypothesis in its purest sense because it's very probable that if a person has an idiolect of the same language with more color names he will be quicker to class colors e.g. english speakers that uses words like sky blue or cyan might be closer to the speed of Russian speakers. Does any experience regarding this have been conducted ? In regard of your question, in one of my language i have a four system of color : light, dark, red and ochre. I put ochre in because I imagine the speakers as a hunter gatherer people that would use red to orange earth as a pigment, while it refers to yellowish, to brownish, to orange-like colors it's pragmatically used for a lot other stuff. Basically 'dark' and 'light' are "back ground" colors while 'red' and 'ochre' are stand out colors. The former refer to bright solid colors and the later more dirty low saturations ones. So 'red' would be used for a lot of colors that stand out in nature so for example, a blue flower or bird could be seen as red. Vegetation would vary between dark when green and ochre when redish or yellowish. The sky is dark at night, light in the day, red at sunrise and sunset and ochre when cloudy. The moon, sun, and stars are light but astronomical phenomenon like low horizon or eclipse can render them red or ochre/dark.
Very interesting idea with blue vs. cyan in English. I would be interested to see how lighting designers and people who work with light and the label of cyan differentiate the colors. There's a perfect thesis topic for somebody. Your system is super cool. You have labels that cut the wheel into larger parts. And would those parts even be like a pie?
@@wdeantucker I was thinking more about artists, graphic designer, painters and the like, but probably a lighting designer would be more familiar with such terms. There seems to be also an influence from gender/sex with woman having a better color preception. While at least partially cultural and stereotypical (e.g. it's expected of girls to know the name of more nuances), this gender difference seems to be at least explained by some biological and genetic phenomena (men have a higher chance of being colorblind and some women can have a fourth type of cone cells). It's greatly inspired by the Berlin and Kay theory where in the 3rd stage they have something like 4 colors. In the refined version of the theory it includes the possibility that other colors can be included at some stages in order to take into account systems that doesn't fit neatly in a simple hue divide of colors. I don't remember which language, but some language have a system that compose a light vs. dark and a wet vs. dry axis. I believe that wet vs dry is similar to our warm vs. cold color but also can include a notion of texture. So my system wouldn't work exactly well with a pie or at least would be a very alien way to my speaker to think about colors. If forced to label such chart, they might either say that almost all is light or red. However, maybe if printed on a black card board, they would label the center of the pie as light and they might label the exterior part that fade to desaturated colors, especially around orange and yellow, as "ochre". Also the desaturated blues would be seen as dark. The center light part near yellow and cyan would extend outward. So in the end the color circle would be divided by a cresent motif with a kind of triangle in the center.
In Spanish dark blue is azul, and light blue is celeste. In modern Greek dark blue is βλε (ble) and light blue is γαλάζιο (galazio) In my own conlang I have over 6 blues (I may make more) cause I just love the idea of many many different colour shades being named. Also the word for colour in my conlang means "the essence of beauty for the eyes/ to been seen" ^_^
I was surprised teal wasn't its own colour. I used to be ineterested in colour theory and I find it odd there wouldn't be a even amount of colours. Every colour have a complimentary, so of course there is an even amount, but I guess I wasn't really thninking about language there.
Well, technically, the reason for the odd number is actually because of "gray", which _is actually its own complement._ But there are still a couple of oddballs in that list anyway. The traditional wheel of "primary colors" has six colors, based on a complementary system. Then there's "brown" which, as some people have pointed out in the past, is kinda weird because if you look at it objectively, it's not actually it's own color at all, it's really just "dark orange" (but nobody calls it that). However, I think the main reason why it gets its own color name is just because it is _so incredibly common_ in nature, etc, so people just really had to deal with it a lot, so it was just ultimately much more convenient to have a simpler term for it. And then there's "pink", which I think is also a bit special because _it technically does not exist._ There is technically no such color of light as "pink". At least, in terms of our physical world, anyway. Every other hue on the color wheel can be mapped to a single frequency wavelength of light, but there is no single frequency of light which is actually "pink light". It just doesn't exist. The only way you can make someone perceive "pink" is by simultaneously stimulating the red and blue cones in the eye (opposite ends of the spectrum), so it requires at least two light frequencies to be combined to make that color happen at all. And I've always rather suspected this is part of the reason why it gets its own word, even in contexts where most other non-primary colors don't: Somewhere deep in our brains, subconsciously, we know it's _different,_ somehow, even if we don't actually realize why. And that makes it deserving of its own term. But of course this is really only a random hypothesis on my part...
@@foogod4237 I'd argue that pink is just light red. Combination of red and blue is purple, and yes, there is no single wave frequency that can be associated with this color.
A few corrections: 1. Old High German blao comes from Proto-Germanic. It wasn't borrowed from Old Norse blár 2. Old Norse blár is sometimes translated as black (specifically in poetry, mind you) but I agree with Old Norse specialist Dr. Jackson Crawford that this is misguided as ravens are in fact not black but instead have a very dark blue sheen. As for the bláir menn "blue men" described in Old Norse literature, Dr. Crawford suggests that blár might have just been used as a categorical term especially meant to make black people seem very foreign to the reader and since svartr was already used to describe the hair of people so a black person in an Old Norse context would have been assumed to be someone with black hair rather than dark skin (on a sidenote, this is also sometimes present in older speakers of German. I recently spoke to a 90-something year old German lady who described her very light-skinned husband as "black" because of his dark hair). So in order to distinguish black-haired men from dark-skinned men, Old Norse writers used the word for blue. Aside from this, there's also no trace of this particular root meaning "black" in any of the Germanic or non-Germanic cognates
I thought I could make a color system based on luminosity, saturation (how 'colorful' or vivid the color is) and to finish with 'redness'. Luminosity would single out the darkest and lightest colors : black and white. Saturation would allow to describe shades of grey (as the less vivid colors) and to talk about the 'colors of the rainbow', as the most vivid ones. The fun part is this color wheel : of course, red is the reddest color. The least red color (shades of grey and other parts of the wheel being neutral) would be green. Meanwhile, blue/indigo and yellow would respectively be the darkest and lightest of the vivid colors. Purple or orange being balances between redness and dark or light. Finally, I thought I could have the words for the three basic values to originate from words for sentiments : scary/reassuring for dark/light ; entertaining/boring for vivid/grayish ; exciting/calming for redder/greener.
An interesting tidbit about the color development order in language is that it mirrors the order of when the cones in our eyes "come online" after birth. At first, a newborn can only really see in black and white (and super low-res, too, like almost 20/2000 vision at birth). But within about 1-2 weeks, they can see red. Then, at 12-16 weeks, they can distinguish red from green, but have limited or no capacity to distinguish blue. Lastly, after 17-18 weeks or so, they're able to distinguish blue (if they couldn't already) and they have about the level of accuity of an adult in terms of resolution.
From a conlang perspective, I had an idea from playing with different perceptions of colour (e.g. what colours would dogs see). Along with Light and Dark distinctions, I've divided the colours into Blue/Purple, Cyan/White, Green/Yellow, and Orange/Red/Black. I know these colour blocks might not be naturalistic from a human standpoint, but through the limited colour perception of a dog's eyes these seem like distinct colour groups. That's also why I've lumped cyan/white and red/black together, since these would be hard to tell apart to a dog, so I'll derive cyan and red words from the white and black root words.
When Homer described the sea as wine-dark he could just be describing the actual colour of the sea, since it can change and become reddish depending on the weather and time of day.
For the Iliad example of wine-dark sea, if the original wording really is wine-*dark* specifically then it doesn't need to refer to color at all, just the darkness, so no, homer didn't think of cows and water as the same color. And the sea varies extremely in its colors depending on the situation, so that's really a bad example
Certain English speakers split "cyan" or "sky blue" and general blue. My first answer upon seeing the wheel was "indefinite", not "infinite" - and I was able to rattle off around 7 colour names (excluding the white shades).
I was taught as a child that cyan is a separate color and for me it's clearly distinguishable from green or blue. It's between them, like orange is between red and yellow.
same applies turkic languages, in the days of old they used kö:k for both green and blue. Göy in azeri, kük in bashkir göğ in turkish comes from it, and nowadays more restricted to blue. For green now most turks use the word yašıl which comes from yaš usually means wet, fresh or young (maybe separate words) and associated with plants and vegetables. Göy's green meaning today is found in words like göyerti (vegetable), göy soğan (green onion), göyermek (literally to get blue, and also to sprout for plants) interestingly the main word for sky right now in most turkic languages, is göy too. I dont know exactly if that was of same meaning back then or not, becausr i've always seen the compound kö:k teŋri which means blue sky, and maybe the sky meaning of the kö:k is secondary Moreover, "beautiful" in turkic languages might have derived from blue, like göyçek, göyce (these two more obvious) and gözel. I guess our ancestors just liked blue lol gokturks yağız means brown in turkish and probably related to yaq- (to burn) qızıl means red in most turkics, but its meaning changed in azeri and now means "gold" sarı means yellow, but in old turkic it meant white too
In my conlang, there was originally no word for red, because their blood is purple. Also, their enviroment is also purple-ish, dark blue-ish, with really reflective, light yellow soil. So these are their words for color: ilik - purple var - black/dark fer - White/light ger - light yellow n'ekilik - blue/green (direct translation: eye-purple) And these are the words of color that were picked up from new dimensions they explored (deformed Hungarian words basically): pros - red/brown kik - blue zid - green
To be honest, to me this raises the question: Why are they even able to perceive red at all, if it was never a significant part of their evolutionary environment? It seems like there would be no evolutionary advantage to it, so it would be an ability that likely just wouldn't even develop as a species in the first place... (and in that case, it would probably make more sense for them to describe the concept of this color they can't even see as something like "infra-yellow", IMHO...)
@@foogod4237 it's because it's implied that they were created by game developer-like gods who used the same "human" template, and also sometimes were pretty lazy. (It's also because I was lazy and I didn't want to find out what kind of wavelenghts would their eyes even percieve in this enviroment, so I just assumed that if we have 3 types of cones in our eyes and we can see a ton of color, then they would see those colors too, or at least would be able to somewhat identitify them.)
About a decade ago I had an idea for a conlang used by an aquatic race which distinguished several shades of blue but classed everything from pink to yellow as "rocky".
I'm thinking about making a conlang for the elves in my world, and like many colors in our world, their color names will be all based on plant names like Violet or Fuchsia or Orange, but with the twist that most of these plants have no real English equivalents, so nothing like Roses or Violets but their unique flora of this region. Even their equivalent of the word "Palette", for the elves, actually mean field or meadow. Also, like Arabic, they will have it's own unique pattern applied in their triconsonantal root system( In arabic I believe is the IX one). What's funny is that plant names here are named after past tragic characters, kinda like how many Greek flowers have a myth associated with it's existence like Narcissus, but these will be named after real individuals from this world, like how Fuchs is behind the name Fuchsia(flower) and eventually Fuchsia(color). Imagine if then, theaters create a play based on a "myth" about Fuchs, and people start to think Fuchsia is the name of the flower/color and Fuchs was named after the flower, not the other way around. So all plant names, elves believe come from nature, and their heroes have these flowery names, really displaying their romantic way of seeing the world. However, it's the other way around. No names there emerged "naturally" from descriptions of the flower's traits and behaviors, or from sound changes of some obscure proto-word, but "artificially", from whoever found the flower first, and myths were build to romanticize the true story, of how some grieving women cried somewhere and that flower grew there or some monster was slain and it's blood sprouted or something. The idea will be quite artificial, as artificial ways one sees nature and romanticizes it the furthest they civilize and live away from nature is the main theme of this culture, so their simpler "color name palette" was replaced with a complex one based on plant names, many of which elves only know because they saw an artist use or a theater did, because they never went to nature to find the real flower. One funny example of that is how people I know, whom never saw a violet flower, think it's a synonym for purple, and don't know the flower Violet is more blue than purple. It also uses the idea of simulation and simulacra from Jean Baudrillard, but applied to a whole civilization, so the colors are a third-order simulacra, and thus, completely artificial in the sense that imitates a romanticized nature with a convenient narrative justifying it instead of the more "boring" truth. All of this is based on my experiences with plant names as a Brazilian. Many have native Tupi names for the most common and widespread flora which the natives knew. Some have names the Portuguese gave based on saints or comparing to some European flower they knew, and then some "Fuchsias", because of some German botanist whom found a new species in the wild. In this world, all "Tupi" names were replaced by "Fuchsia" names. Also, It's a great excuse to create my own "Jabberwocks".
English also differentiates between red and pink which not all languages do, so in the same way russian and italian speakers see dark and light blue as two different colors, we see dark and light red as different colors with different cultural conotations
In Russian, dark and light blue differ not just in darkness, but in hue. Голубой means either lighter shades of ultramarine, or any shade of greenish blue bordering teal. Синий, dark blue, is reserved for the ultramarine kind of color or dull dark blues.
If you are creating a conlang, please also consider the possibility that some speakers of that conlang will have a different spectrum that they can see. Cats have only two types of cone cells in their eyes (forr green and yellow wave lengths) so they probably cannot really differentiate between red and dark yellow, but on the other hand their eyes can detect near UV light. Hence catfolk in Fantasy, or aliens eveolving from Cat-analogons, will see colours we don't and vice versa; otoh vampire bats can pervept near infrared Likewise when your story has people with the ability to speak with animals, they will have to learn new colors to respect this difference in physiology.
In Slovian language Bþækytny(light blue,not exactly cyan) and Ne-/Njebesky(deep,true royal blue) are considered different shades of "blue" in English Note:Nje- used in southern Dialects
Red green and blue. Red = red Orange = lightgreenred Yellow: lightestgreenred Green: green Blue: blue Purple: bluered Pink: lightbluered White: greenbluered Gray: darkgreenbluered Black: darkestgreenbluered
did you know that in PG the word red "raudaz" can be turned into "raudjan" which literally means "to make red" but they meant "to exterminate, to slaughter" kind of brutal, no?
Well, actually, in Slavic languages, light blue is often a separate color, and it's mostly called "the pigeon color". Exapmles from the languages I speak freely, both of these are my native languages, include: голубий, lat. holubyy in Ukrainian, голубой, lat, goluboy in Russian. Both mean literally the pigeon color. And here's an example from Polish, which I speak somewhat fluently since I have spent a few years in Poland, learning Polish for a year beforehand. Niebieski, the sounds would be spelled something like nyebyeskie with English orthography. It means light blue, but actually in Polish it's the "main" blue color, while in Ukrainian, for example, dark blue is the "main" one. Yes, in the blue-light blue dichotomy there's often a "main" color in Slavic languages, even when they're perceived as rather separate base colors. Also, a funny thing, in Polish the color for dark blue basically means "the pomegranade color", or granatowy (granatovy with English spelling). And it's the "secondary" base color for blue for them. I don't really know how pomegranades are related to blue, except, well, the stains they leave on clothes maybe.
"granatowy" case was always a mystery for me and even now I'm unable to find any justificiation for it. My guess is that "granatowy" is not related to pomegranate but to something that sounded similar. "Niebieski" literally can mean "sky color", but we call that way almost every blue shade, unless it's really dark - in that case it's "granatowy".
Palestine distinguishes blue and green colors(azraq and akhdar respectively) The sky is known as "al khadra" meaning "the green" See color distinction on Wikipedia
Well, our eyes perceive red, green, and blue. So I'd start with those. So would your computer monitor or television. Then I'd mix them together to see what I get. Green and blue make Cyan. Blue and red make Magenta. Red and green make Yellow. CMY. Hmmm... my color printer uses those colors, plus black, which technically isn't a color because it is the descriptive term for the absence of light. No light, no color. Since the days of the Sumerians we've agreed that there are 360 degrees in a circle. We arrange colors on a wheel and space them 60 degrees apart. And technically, we've been talking about hues. Hues are pure and don't have any white, gray, or black added to them to make tints, tones, or shades, respectively. When talking about color, we're limited to seeing 100% of what we can see at the maximum. We can't see more than we can see. When we see the maximum amounts of long (red), medium (green), and short (blue) light waves, we see white. 100% 100% 100%. If we don't see any, we have 0% 0% 0%. You can only divide 100% by two twice (50% and 25%) before you start getting into fractions, and nobody likes those. So instead of saying there are 100 degrees of red and green and blue light, we say there are 256. Why? You can cut 256 in half eight times! (256, 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1). Music notation uses the same set of numbers to describe arrangements of sound waves. But why stop at 256 light levels? Why not go to 512? Money. Creating monitors that can display with that degree of accuracy would be pretty expensive, and no one would know if they're accurate because we can't see there is a difference in colors until they're about 5 units apart and you know where to look. Put a red 255 next to a red 251. If you didn't know they were different, you wouldn't see any difference. So we're stuck with 16.77 million colors (256*256*256). Have fun naming all of them.
If my conlang had a pack of crayons 10 pack Magenta Orange Lemon Green Blue Purple Black Auburn White Salmon Magenta=red Salmon=pink Auburn=brown Lemon=yellow 20 pack additions Charcoal Silver Amber Forest Jade Azure Navy Indigo Lavender Plum
@@jarlfenrir Goddamn, not only did you correctly point out my mistake but also reminded me of a nerdy comment I made 3 years ago that I did not want to be reminded of.
Idea: colours being more aligned with concepts or ideas Like rust and withering brown being the same colour, but different from fur-brown, even though they would significantly overlap on the colour wheel
lamentablemente ningún idioma tiene un nombre para mi color favorito, "color esmeralda" (entre celeste y verde), no importa lo que los idiomas digan, lo defenderé como color propio hasta el último de mis días
Neymarese color words Red Amber(Orange) Green Violet(Blue) White Black Compound colors Blackwhite(Lt gray) Blackred(Maroon) Blackamber(Brown) Blackgreen(Forest) Blackviolet(Navy) Whiteblack(Dk gray) Whitered(Pink) Whiteamber(Beige) Whitegreen(Mint) Whiteviolet(Cloud) Redamber(Scarlet) Greenamber(Olive) Greenviolet(Teal) Redviolet(Magenta)
@@wdeantucker In my experience, cyan is being recognised more and more as just a colour term the same as any other. Admittedly I have a small sample size, but that is my experience nonetheless. My hypothesis is that because of it's importance to CMYK subtractive printing, and its importance to the computers that control that, Cyan is becoming more recognised by people that interact with computers for publishing reasons - be they professional or amateur.
@@dafoex Totally agree. I would not be surprised at all if cyan became a "standard color" like blue or green by, say, 2100. But it's hard to be more precise than that since this kind of language change tends to be a very slow process. That said, I suspect it will have some difficulty supplanting more established terms like "turquoise" and "teal".
My (partially) real time reaction as a linguist/"hyperfixates on many scientific things" person to this video 0:29 WHY DID YOU SKIP OVER CYAN (witch is VERY much a color, see the comments lol) 0:48 totally, pink is more of a magenta-ish color if you're going linguisticly (is that even a real word?), while light red is just a light shade of red. However, if you were to talk about scientific colors, which we aren't, then they are the same, because magenta wouldn't exist. 1:40 no lol. THEY'RE BOTH SHADES OF YELLOW- 1:52 I personally differentiate between blue and cyan, which is close enough. 2:55 In my main conlang, Afasy (which is actually becoming my second main conlang as of rn), my fictional species who speaks this language can see ultraviolet wavelengths, so they have 3-4 different color names for those. Also yes it does differentiate between blue and cyan- 4:50 how is brown there, brown is darker- 4:50 also this graph expresses the importance of having cyan to balance out the color sections
Homer was blind - maybe this is why he called both the face of an oxen and the sea 'wine-coloured'. Or maybe he was talking about a bloody face and a sea of blood.
1:54 And also Hebrew. The word for dark blue (or blue as a whole) is כחול, and the word for light blue is תכלת And also, I heard about a conlang named Ygyde that has 64(!) color names, each representing a specific RGB value.
I remember seeing a joke conlang that requires you to say the specific RGB value of an object. So like a bee you'd have to embed 255,255,0 into the word itself with like suffixes and all that.
Irish shifts the colour wheel over a bit: "uaine" covers some of the yellow spectrum and is thought of as a "vivid" green like you'd use in dyes. "Glas" partly covers the teal end of blue, but it's mostly what you'd think of as "green" in English. Interestingly, "glas" is "blue" in Welsh. It also gets used for grey coloured animals, not dissimilar to how "blue" gets used to refer to grey animals in English. For some people, "glas" also covers light blues, while "gorm" is for darker shades. There's a distinct word for grey, however, which is "liath". On the other side is the wheel, you have the two terms for "red": "dearg" covers most of what you'd think of as "red" while "rua" covers the more "orangy" and coppery shades.
4:27 Jackson Crawford's dissertation *The Historical Development of Basic Color Terms In Old Norse-icelandic* argues that blár doesn't mean "black" or even necessarily "dark". I'd recommend having a look for anyone interested.
I’d be interested in how a language might develop amongst a universally blind culture, we can call them “batmen.” The batmen language might develop a schema color analogous to how we discuss tones, or they might have influence from another culture that can see, in the same way that our Braille has words for colors.
If a culture was totally blind they would learn color as it relates to temperature. They would know white paint cools a roof more than black paint. But also that certain objects are transparent. With enough time scientists in a blind culture would be able to identify different colors of petals or feathers by passing them through bright light from a prism. Heat will reflect from objects at different places along the spectrum. The fact that sunburn/damage happens at different angles to the feeling of heat is also noteworthy. So even if a blind culture doesn't use color often, they still need it for technological developments and to fill in the gaps of the electromagnetic spectrum.
it may be similar to the way we discuss wavelengths of light that are invisible to us seeing people yes, the atmosphere lets the visible spectrum pass through the atmosphere surprisingly well, but there is an equally large 'transparency window' at around ten microns, in the infrared range, and we don't bother distinguishing too much between those at least with separate words even IR cameras are mostly translated in brightness not hue the bee-men might call us simplistic for lumping in together so many shades as 'ultraviolet', they may just say they are more shades of violet or it's the light that has other colours like miolet and flurple or something like that basically, i think the properties of light will be more understood without relating them to our 380-750nm brains think also, braille is not be the best example as it's simply a writing system, the perceptions of colours already is pre-cooked by extensive conversation from seeing people and massive influence from the seeing world i think some of these batmen who are in close dialogue with seers may be familiar with the concepts of each colour and will find it curious that we have names like 'purple' for combinations of different wavelengths, or that we can be tricked by three colours put together, or all other ways in which colour influences our culture, but besides the cultural curiosity they will not need to be immediately familiar with apparently tiny disctinctions to such a degree that it influences common language irradiating heat (warm infrared), bee-light, seer-light, microwaves, etc.
I don't see any reason they would develop any schema for color at all. Why invent names for things that effectively don't even exist in your world? It's the same as how ancient humans never developed terms for different radio frequencies, or the feel of the Earth's magnetic field... If they had exposure to other cultures which could see, then they might adopt some terms for these (theoretical) concepts, but then they would most likely just adopt terms from the language(s) of the other cultures, I think, so their view of color would basically end up depending entirely on what the other culture's view of color was anyway. When they reached a certain level of technology, yes, they might need to develop ways to describe it, but at that point you're really just talking about describing an arbitrary part of the electromagnetic spectrum. They'd probably refer to it much the same way we do with radio waves (by talking about something equivalent to "the 500nm band" or some such). We don't invent new words for every increment of every small slice of the EM spectrum we study, so why would they?
I used this video to create a different colour "hierarchy" based on Berlin and Kay. The colours it does and doesn't have may seem odd, but that's because the language's speakers, being related to canines rather than humans, cannot distinguish between red and green. lalagyh- white (from a word meaning 'to sparkle', originally from a word meaning 'star') kalashyh - black (from a word meaning 'nothing') tashilyh - dark brown (from a word meaning 'blood'). applies to reds and dark browns. gerakyh - light brown (from a demonym of the speakers, due to their fur colour). applies to light browns, oranges, and greens. gerakyh lalag - yellow (meaning 'sparkling light brown'). initially a shade of gerakyh but considered its own colour despite the name. kalikyh - blue (from a word meaning 'sky'). applies to blue and purple.
Colors in Argentinian: Rojo,Roço(red) Naranja,Arantyone(orange) Amariglio,Gliallo(yellow) Verde(green) Asul Turquesa(light blue) Blu,Asul Mariño(dark blue) Violeta(purple) Rosa(pink) Cafè,Marronebrown) Nero(black) Bianco(white) Gri(fem) and Griglio(masc) for grey Other spellings used in loanwords from Italy
Well done. You video cleared up a philosophical argument between mi son and I will let people know about your channel. It was very interesting as well as very informative. An entertaining to boot Pastor Mark Honas
Great video that could have been so much longer - it just scratches the surface. All the described examples are simply variants of mapping light of a particular wavelength to a name. Some languages use other factors than purely the objective wavelength though. Take Hungarian: piros and vörös would both translate to 'red' in English, but the distinction isn't one of hue but of context. Piros is generally used for things man-made and/or detached from emotion, and vörös for natural and/or emotional things. So piros tulipán (red tulip, non-emotional) but vörös rózsa (red rose, associated with love and passion). They can even be used with the same noun, so piros lámpás is a red traffic light, but vörös lámpás is the kind of red light illuminating ladies of negotiable virtue. Even in English you get echoes of this in the way scarlet or crimson sound more passionate than say cherry red. I'm sure there are a lot more things like this just waiting for someone to elaborate.
Due to using Mspaint for like, 15 years, and loving 'full' colors, usually I think of: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Denim, Cyan, Blue, Purple, Magenta, and Rose
I made a conlang with 14 color terms: Bright red Deep red(auburn) Yellow Bright green Deep green Bright blue Deep blue Bright purple Deep purple Pink Golden Silver White(pastel) Black
Out of all the colours, I don't get why light blue isn't universally different in all languages from dark blue, it just looks so different from dark blue. Light blue looks more different from dark blue than brown does from orange.
In my language there is distinction between dark and light blue, but for me those are too similar to have different names. However brown always was totally different than orange for me!
3:29 Archaeologists have discovered, from residual particles left in amphorae salvaged from shipwrecks, that in ancient Greece, the wine was actually what we today would call 'blue' in color! Also, the cattle that were bred for leather and meat in Bronze Age Greece were a particular species of auroch, noted for its steel blue-colored faces and jowls. Who knew!!?
My language has six terms: Black,White,Red,Orange,Green,Blue Black=darkest grays and hues White=lightest grays and hues Red=reddish or warm hues Green=greenish or cool hues Orange=yellowish hues of red Blue=purplish hues of green
Check out the study Genetic and Functional Odorant Receptor Variation in the Homo Lineage (or an article on it) It’s about scent* perception in prehistory hominid species like neandrathals and denisovans. To sum it up, we used DNA from those extinct hominid species to recreate their olfactory receptors, and tested them out. All three species, humans, neandrathals, and denisovans could smell the same things, but had different sensitivities to different types of smell. Denisovans were more perceptive to the scent of honey for example, likely because it was consumed more by them. The point is to think of what the elves in your setting do, and what’s important to them, and think about which colors they may be more or less perceptive to the distinctions of *which you may also be interested in for scent terminology, some natural languages have scent terms with as clear boundaries as color terms, like the Aslian language family
Italian not only makes distincion between two shades of blue, it makes distinction between three of them. _Blu_ is the word for dark blue. Light blue is called either _azzurro_ or _celeste_ : normally the latter is used for a very light blue.
In polish, we have three words for blue. błękitny- light blue niebieski- blue granatowy- very dark blue All three are used in everyday life. Interestingly, "niebieski" doesn't have a nominalisation, while the other two do.
as for my taste, "błękitny" is not distinct from blue, just a lighter shade. And I hear more often people saying "light blue" (jasny niebieski) than "błękitny".
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Italian does indeed distinguish between light blue and dark blue. There are two words for light blue: _azzurro_ and _celeste_. _Celeste_ means "belonging to the sky".
"light blue" and "dark blue" don't seem quite appropriate as descriptions for the difference between these colors; I think that the main difference is that of hue (azurro/голубой being between blu/синий and green); the fact that the saturated versions of these colors differ in lightness is accidental.
@@locoluis1978 It's not accident. Dark and light blue does make some sense, because different hues are associated with different luminescence by the brain. Our retina are more sensitive to colors more to the center of the specter (yellow, green and cyan) than the extremes (blue, violet and red). So celest, which is a hue closer to cyan, is naturally more "lighter/brigher" than azure. They not only have different amount of chroma, they have different luminescence.
Here is an example:
This celeste: 00bfff
And this blue: 00004a
They have both the same amount of chroma and max saturation, but the celest has greater luminosity/value, buy a lot.
In other words, you can never get a color from the celest hue and get a darker color than a one from the azure hue if they have the same amount of saturation and chroma. That is why it makes sense to call one dark and the other light.
In contrast, you have this yellow and this aquamarine: ffe000; 00ff73. They have the same chroma, saturation value and luminosity. They truly only differ in hue. That is because they are about the same but opposed distance from the peak of retina's color sensitivity.
We also say celeste in spanish but most people will tell you it's a shade of azul (blue)
Then there's turqoise, I'm sure depending on who you ask they would tell you it's either a shade ofblue or a shade of green
We could also all say cyan which I think is becoming more common
Isn’t it blu? (I’m not an italian speaker so feel free to correct me here)
@@sby60118 _Blu_ is the word for dark blue. Light blue is called either _azzurro_ or _celeste_ : normally the latter is used for a very light blue.
I have seen several videos on this topic, and what is never mentioned is that there are also languages without fixed color terms. One example is Malecu (aka Guatuso) spoken in Costa Rica, where the way to describe a color is comparing it to an animal, plant or object. For instance, for something that is green, they could describe it as "grass-like" or "leaf-like", but there is no fixed comparison for each color, so it depends on the speaker and the exact shade of the color. The texture is actually also incorporated in the comparison, so something brown and hairy could be compared to a brown hairy animal, but never to dirt or bark.
so saying his chest hair is ox-like would be correct. neato
i think colors in all languages probably came off just like that, since most colors have derived origin. But nowadays, for example in my language when more specific colors are needed to specify people employ this kind of approach
it's sorta like how in english you can say sth has a 'ash' colour
Before I was 4 or 5, I was somehow taught to differentiate/name “light blue” and “dark blue” in English and have since always viewed them as two colors.
Call it cyan please 😢
Because of the help of this video, my conlang uses these colors:
1. Ihlun (meaning "shimmer of light"): White, yellow.
2. Kuilasa (meaning "soil"): Red, orange, brown.
3. Tem (meaning "grass"): Green.
4. Ēloatso (Meaning "night"): Black, grey, blue, purple.
Oh I love that! It’s so poetic and would be really beautiful to describe things like Homer described the sea as ‘wine-dark’ :)
how is grey related to blue? #GrayIsNotBlue
@@Writer_Productions_MapWhat color are greyhounds then?
Interesting.
@@MisterJimLee wtf are greyhounds
Edit: White and brown?
I feel like 'teal', as an intermediate between blue and green, might become a fundamental color in the future. The addition of orange as an intermediate between red and yellow is very recent after all.
Also I feel like the experiments that asks for speakers of different languages to class different colors is not necessarily any evidence for the Sappir-Whorf hypothesis in its purest sense because it's very probable that if a person has an idiolect of the same language with more color names he will be quicker to class colors e.g. english speakers that uses words like sky blue or cyan might be closer to the speed of Russian speakers. Does any experience regarding this have been conducted ?
In regard of your question, in one of my language i have a four system of color : light, dark, red and ochre. I put ochre in because I imagine the speakers as a hunter gatherer people that would use red to orange earth as a pigment, while it refers to yellowish, to brownish, to orange-like colors it's pragmatically used for a lot other stuff. Basically 'dark' and 'light' are "back ground" colors while 'red' and 'ochre' are stand out colors. The former refer to bright solid colors and the later more dirty low saturations ones. So 'red' would be used for a lot of colors that stand out in nature so for example, a blue flower or bird could be seen as red. Vegetation would vary between dark when green and ochre when redish or yellowish. The sky is dark at night, light in the day, red at sunrise and sunset and ochre when cloudy. The moon, sun, and stars are light but astronomical phenomenon like low horizon or eclipse can render them red or ochre/dark.
Very interesting idea with blue vs. cyan in English. I would be interested to see how lighting designers and people who work with light and the label of cyan differentiate the colors. There's a perfect thesis topic for somebody.
Your system is super cool. You have labels that cut the wheel into larger parts. And would those parts even be like a pie?
@@wdeantucker I was thinking more about artists, graphic designer, painters and the like, but probably a lighting designer would be more familiar with such terms. There seems to be also an influence from gender/sex with woman having a better color preception. While at least partially cultural and stereotypical (e.g. it's expected of girls to know the name of more nuances), this gender difference seems to be at least explained by some biological and genetic phenomena (men have a higher chance of being colorblind and some women can have a fourth type of cone cells).
It's greatly inspired by the Berlin and Kay theory where in the 3rd stage they have something like 4 colors. In the refined version of the theory it includes the possibility that other colors can be included at some stages in order to take into account systems that doesn't fit neatly in a simple hue divide of colors. I don't remember which language, but some language have a system that compose a light vs. dark and a wet vs. dry axis. I believe that wet vs dry is similar to our warm vs. cold color but also can include a notion of texture.
So my system wouldn't work exactly well with a pie or at least would be a very alien way to my speaker to think about colors. If forced to label such chart, they might either say that almost all is light or red. However, maybe if printed on a black card board, they would label the center of the pie as light and they might label the exterior part that fade to desaturated colors, especially around orange and yellow, as "ochre". Also the desaturated blues would be seen as dark. The center light part near yellow and cyan would extend outward. So in the end the color circle would be divided by a cresent motif with a kind of triangle in the center.
I definitely see dark teal at least as a separate colour, it's the colour of seagrass and water in many places.
Cyan is the exact in between of blue and green, I’d prefer it was cyan instead of aqua
Red, blue, green, cyan, yellow, and magenta might be the main colors of the future
In Spanish dark blue is azul, and light blue is celeste. In modern Greek dark blue is βλε (ble) and light blue is γαλάζιο (galazio)
In my own conlang I have over 6 blues (I may make more) cause I just love the idea of many many different colour shades being named.
Also the word for colour in my conlang means "the essence of beauty for the eyes/ to been seen" ^_^
I was surprised teal wasn't its own colour. I used to be ineterested in colour theory and I find it odd there wouldn't be a even amount of colours. Every colour have a complimentary, so of course there is an even amount, but I guess I wasn't really thninking about language there.
Well, technically, the reason for the odd number is actually because of "gray", which _is actually its own complement._
But there are still a couple of oddballs in that list anyway. The traditional wheel of "primary colors" has six colors, based on a complementary system. Then there's "brown" which, as some people have pointed out in the past, is kinda weird because if you look at it objectively, it's not actually it's own color at all, it's really just "dark orange" (but nobody calls it that). However, I think the main reason why it gets its own color name is just because it is _so incredibly common_ in nature, etc, so people just really had to deal with it a lot, so it was just ultimately much more convenient to have a simpler term for it.
And then there's "pink", which I think is also a bit special because _it technically does not exist._ There is technically no such color of light as "pink". At least, in terms of our physical world, anyway. Every other hue on the color wheel can be mapped to a single frequency wavelength of light, but there is no single frequency of light which is actually "pink light". It just doesn't exist. The only way you can make someone perceive "pink" is by simultaneously stimulating the red and blue cones in the eye (opposite ends of the spectrum), so it requires at least two light frequencies to be combined to make that color happen at all. And I've always rather suspected this is part of the reason why it gets its own word, even in contexts where most other non-primary colors don't: Somewhere deep in our brains, subconsciously, we know it's _different,_ somehow, even if we don't actually realize why. And that makes it deserving of its own term. But of course this is really only a random hypothesis on my part...
@@foogod4237 I'd argue that pink is just light red. Combination of red and blue is purple, and yes, there is no single wave frequency that can be associated with this color.
A few corrections:
1. Old High German blao comes from Proto-Germanic. It wasn't borrowed from Old Norse blár
2. Old Norse blár is sometimes translated as black (specifically in poetry, mind you) but I agree with Old Norse specialist Dr. Jackson Crawford that this is misguided as ravens are in fact not black but instead have a very dark blue sheen. As for the bláir menn "blue men" described in Old Norse literature, Dr. Crawford suggests that blár might have just been used as a categorical term especially meant to make black people seem very foreign to the reader and since svartr was already used to describe the hair of people so a black person in an Old Norse context would have been assumed to be someone with black hair rather than dark skin (on a sidenote, this is also sometimes present in older speakers of German. I recently spoke to a 90-something year old German lady who described her very light-skinned husband as "black" because of his dark hair). So in order to distinguish black-haired men from dark-skinned men, Old Norse writers used the word for blue. Aside from this, there's also no trace of this particular root meaning "black" in any of the Germanic or non-Germanic cognates
I thought I could make a color system based on luminosity, saturation (how 'colorful' or vivid the color is) and to finish with 'redness'.
Luminosity would single out the darkest and lightest colors : black and white. Saturation would allow to describe shades of grey (as the less vivid colors) and to talk about the 'colors of the rainbow', as the most vivid ones.
The fun part is this color wheel : of course, red is the reddest color. The least red color (shades of grey and other parts of the wheel being neutral) would be green. Meanwhile, blue/indigo and yellow would respectively be the darkest and lightest of the vivid colors. Purple or orange being balances between redness and dark or light.
Finally, I thought I could have the words for the three basic values to originate from words for sentiments : scary/reassuring for dark/light ; entertaining/boring for vivid/grayish ; exciting/calming for redder/greener.
An interesting tidbit about the color development order in language is that it mirrors the order of when the cones in our eyes "come online" after birth.
At first, a newborn can only really see in black and white (and super low-res, too, like almost 20/2000 vision at birth). But within about 1-2 weeks, they can see red. Then, at 12-16 weeks, they can distinguish red from green, but have limited or no capacity to distinguish blue. Lastly, after 17-18 weeks or so, they're able to distinguish blue (if they couldn't already) and they have about the level of accuity of an adult in terms of resolution.
From a conlang perspective, I had an idea from playing with different perceptions of colour (e.g. what colours would dogs see). Along with Light and Dark distinctions, I've divided the colours into Blue/Purple, Cyan/White, Green/Yellow, and Orange/Red/Black. I know these colour blocks might not be naturalistic from a human standpoint, but through the limited colour perception of a dog's eyes these seem like distinct colour groups. That's also why I've lumped cyan/white and red/black together, since these would be hard to tell apart to a dog, so I'll derive cyan and red words from the white and black root words.
3 years late but dogs can have yellow and blue cones, so they'd differentiate yellows and blues but not reds and greens.
In Cymraeg, blue is often interchangeable with green. For example: glaswellt, which is 'grass' in English, translates directly as 'blue hay'.
When Homer described the sea as wine-dark he could just be describing the actual colour of the sea, since it can change and become reddish depending on the weather and time of day.
For the Iliad example of wine-dark sea, if the original wording really is wine-*dark* specifically then it doesn't need to refer to color at all, just the darkness, so no, homer didn't think of cows and water as the same color. And the sea varies extremely in its colors depending on the situation, so that's really a bad example
Certain English speakers split "cyan" or "sky blue" and general blue.
My first answer upon seeing the wheel was "indefinite", not "infinite" - and I was able to rattle off around 7 colour names (excluding the white shades).
I was taught as a child that cyan is a separate color and for me it's clearly distinguishable from green or blue. It's between them, like orange is between red and yellow.
same applies turkic languages, in the days of old they used kö:k for both green and blue. Göy in azeri, kük in bashkir göğ in turkish comes from it, and nowadays more restricted to blue. For green now most turks use the word yašıl which comes from yaš usually means wet, fresh or young (maybe separate words) and associated with plants and vegetables.
Göy's green meaning today is found in words like göyerti (vegetable), göy soğan (green onion), göyermek (literally to get blue, and also to sprout for plants)
interestingly the main word for sky right now in most turkic languages, is göy too. I dont know exactly if that was of same meaning back then or not, becausr i've always seen the compound kö:k teŋri which means blue sky, and maybe the sky meaning of the kö:k is secondary
Moreover, "beautiful" in turkic languages might have derived from blue, like göyçek, göyce (these two more obvious) and gözel. I guess our ancestors just liked blue lol gokturks
yağız means brown in turkish and probably related to yaq- (to burn)
qızıl means red in most turkics, but its meaning changed in azeri and now means "gold"
sarı means yellow, but in old turkic it meant white too
In my conlang, there was originally no word for red, because their blood is purple. Also, their enviroment is also purple-ish, dark blue-ish, with really reflective, light yellow soil.
So these are their words for color:
ilik - purple
var - black/dark
fer - White/light
ger - light yellow
n'ekilik - blue/green (direct translation: eye-purple)
And these are the words of color that were picked up from new dimensions they explored (deformed Hungarian words basically):
pros - red/brown
kik - blue
zid - green
To be honest, to me this raises the question: Why are they even able to perceive red at all, if it was never a significant part of their evolutionary environment? It seems like there would be no evolutionary advantage to it, so it would be an ability that likely just wouldn't even develop as a species in the first place...
(and in that case, it would probably make more sense for them to describe the concept of this color they can't even see as something like "infra-yellow", IMHO...)
@@foogod4237 it's because it's implied that they were created by game developer-like gods who used the same "human" template, and also sometimes were pretty lazy. (It's also because I was lazy and I didn't want to find out what kind of wavelenghts would their eyes even percieve in this enviroment, so I just assumed that if we have 3 types of cones in our eyes and we can see a ton of color, then they would see those colors too, or at least would be able to somewhat identitify them.)
About a decade ago I had an idea for a conlang used by an aquatic race which distinguished several shades of blue but classed everything from pink to yellow as "rocky".
"Teal" is neither green nor blue, but in fact its own color. I will figure anyone who disagrees.
I'm thinking about making a conlang for the elves in my world, and like many colors in our world, their color names will be all based on plant names like Violet or Fuchsia or Orange, but with the twist that most of these plants have no real English equivalents, so nothing like Roses or Violets but their unique flora of this region. Even their equivalent of the word "Palette", for the elves, actually mean field or meadow. Also, like Arabic, they will have it's own unique pattern applied in their triconsonantal root system( In arabic I believe is the IX one).
What's funny is that plant names here are named after past tragic characters, kinda like how many Greek flowers have a myth associated with it's existence like Narcissus, but these will be named after real individuals from this world, like how Fuchs is behind the name Fuchsia(flower) and eventually Fuchsia(color). Imagine if then, theaters create a play based on a "myth" about Fuchs, and people start to think Fuchsia is the name of the flower/color and Fuchs was named after the flower, not the other way around.
So all plant names, elves believe come from nature, and their heroes have these flowery names, really displaying their romantic way of seeing the world. However, it's the other way around. No names there emerged "naturally" from descriptions of the flower's traits and behaviors, or from sound changes of some obscure proto-word, but "artificially", from whoever found the flower first, and myths were build to romanticize the true story, of how some grieving women cried somewhere and that flower grew there or some monster was slain and it's blood sprouted or something.
The idea will be quite artificial, as artificial ways one sees nature and romanticizes it the furthest they civilize and live away from nature is the main theme of this culture, so their simpler "color name palette" was replaced with a complex one based on plant names, many of which elves only know because they saw an artist use or a theater did, because they never went to nature to find the real flower. One funny example of that is how people I know, whom never saw a violet flower, think it's a synonym for purple, and don't know the flower Violet is more blue than purple.
It also uses the idea of simulation and simulacra from Jean Baudrillard, but applied to a whole civilization, so the colors are a third-order simulacra, and thus, completely artificial in the sense that imitates a romanticized nature with a convenient narrative justifying it instead of the more "boring" truth.
All of this is based on my experiences with plant names as a Brazilian. Many have native Tupi names for the most common and widespread flora which the natives knew. Some have names the Portuguese gave based on saints or comparing to some European flower they knew, and then some "Fuchsias", because of some German botanist whom found a new species in the wild. In this world, all "Tupi" names were replaced by "Fuchsia" names. Also, It's a great excuse to create my own "Jabberwocks".
Being colourblind, your divisions are funny 😄
This is honestly a fantastic video and it shocks me how little views it has gotten.
You forgot about brown. Despite it's technically a shade of orange, many people actually see it as a totally different category of shades.
I feel like teal gets used enough to count as it’s own category
English also differentiates between red and pink which not all languages do, so in the same way russian and italian speakers see dark and light blue as two different colors, we see dark and light red as different colors with different cultural conotations
My conlang has six basic color terms
Gaelic(blue,orange)
Himba(black,white)
Finnish(green,purple)
Compound colors
Dark green(forest)
Dark white(silver gray)
Dark blue(navy blue)
Dark orange(auburn)
Dark purple(eggplant)
Light blue(azure)
Light purple(lavender)
Light green(lemon)
Light black(charcoal)
Light orange(salmon)
Warm purple(fuchsia)
Warm green(tangerine)
Cold green(teal blue)
Cold purple(indigo)
Prefixes:
Dark(black) Light(white)
Cold(blue) Warm(orange)
In Russian, dark and light blue differ not just in darkness, but in hue. Голубой means either lighter shades of ultramarine, or any shade of greenish blue bordering teal. Синий, dark blue, is reserved for the ultramarine kind of color or dull dark blues.
If you are creating a conlang, please also consider the possibility that some speakers of that conlang will have a different spectrum that they can see. Cats have only two types of cone cells in their eyes (forr green and yellow wave lengths) so they probably cannot really differentiate between red and dark yellow, but on the other hand their eyes can detect near UV light. Hence catfolk in Fantasy, or aliens eveolving from Cat-analogons, will see colours we don't and vice versa; otoh vampire bats can pervept near infrared
Likewise when your story has people with the ability to speak with animals, they will have to learn new colors to respect this difference in physiology.
In Slovian language Bþækytny(light blue,not exactly cyan) and Ne-/Njebesky(deep,true royal blue) are considered different shades of "blue" in English
Note:Nje- used in southern Dialects
Red green and blue.
Red = red
Orange = lightgreenred
Yellow: lightestgreenred
Green: green
Blue: blue
Purple: bluered
Pink: lightbluered
White: greenbluered
Gray: darkgreenbluered
Black: darkestgreenbluered
My Conlang has (aside from white - black) 4 color(-names):
1 (for red+pink)
2 (for orange+yellow)
3 (green+cyan (lightblue))
4 (blue+purple)
did you know that in PG the word red "raudaz" can be turned into "raudjan" which literally means "to make red" but they meant "to exterminate, to slaughter"
kind of brutal, no?
Guloboy and Siniy of Russian? Dark and Light Blue (or the other way around, i forgot)
correct :)
Goluboy is light blue and Siniy is dark blue
I see 4 divisions on the color wheel:
red-orange-yellow,
green-cyan,
cyan-blue,
and purple-pink.
Wine is dark, near black when in big quantity, and so is the ocean.
Homer probably meant near black by using wine-dark.
My new color conlang
Basic terms
Raudu=orange
Glasa=blue
Vapa=white
Zuzu=black
Vihera=green
Pune=purple
Compound colors
Vapapune(lavender)
Vapavihera(lemon)
Vapaglasa(azure mist)
Vaparaudu(flesh pink)
Zuzupune(eggplant)
Zuzuvihera(deep olive)
Zuzuglasa(marine blue)
Zuzuraudu(chestnut)
Zuzuvapa(silver gray)
Vapazuzu(charcoal)
Glasapune(indigo)
Glasavihera(turquoise)
Raudupune(magenta)
Rauduvihera(amber)
Well, actually, in Slavic languages, light blue is often a separate color, and it's mostly called "the pigeon color". Exapmles from the languages I speak freely, both of these are my native languages, include: голубий, lat. holubyy in Ukrainian, голубой, lat, goluboy in Russian. Both mean literally the pigeon color. And here's an example from Polish, which I speak somewhat fluently since I have spent a few years in Poland, learning Polish for a year beforehand. Niebieski, the sounds would be spelled something like nyebyeskie with English orthography. It means light blue, but actually in Polish it's the "main" blue color, while in Ukrainian, for example, dark blue is the "main" one. Yes, in the blue-light blue dichotomy there's often a "main" color in Slavic languages, even when they're perceived as rather separate base colors. Also, a funny thing, in Polish the color for dark blue basically means "the pomegranade color", or granatowy (granatovy with English spelling). And it's the "secondary" base color for blue for them. I don't really know how pomegranades are related to blue, except, well, the stains they leave on clothes maybe.
"granatowy" case was always a mystery for me and even now I'm unable to find any justificiation for it. My guess is that "granatowy" is not related to pomegranate but to something that sounded similar.
"Niebieski" literally can mean "sky color", but we call that way almost every blue shade, unless it's really dark - in that case it's "granatowy".
Slovian
Red(cerwony)
Orange(pomarancowy)
Yellow(zoþty)
Green(zelony)
Blue(njebesky)
Purple(fjoletowy)
Brown(bræzowy)
Black(carny)
White(bjaþy)
Palestine distinguishes blue and green colors(azraq and akhdar respectively)
The sky is known as "al khadra" meaning "the green"
See color distinction on Wikipedia
what about cyan
Well, our eyes perceive red, green, and blue. So I'd start with those. So would your computer monitor or television. Then I'd mix them together to see what I get. Green and blue make Cyan. Blue and red make Magenta. Red and green make Yellow. CMY. Hmmm... my color printer uses those colors, plus black, which technically isn't a color because it is the descriptive term for the absence of light. No light, no color. Since the days of the Sumerians we've agreed that there are 360 degrees in a circle. We arrange colors on a wheel and space them 60 degrees apart. And technically, we've been talking about hues. Hues are pure and don't have any white, gray, or black added to them to make tints, tones, or shades, respectively. When talking about color, we're limited to seeing 100% of what we can see at the maximum. We can't see more than we can see. When we see the maximum amounts of long (red), medium (green), and short (blue) light waves, we see white. 100% 100% 100%. If we don't see any, we have 0% 0% 0%. You can only divide 100% by two twice (50% and 25%) before you start getting into fractions, and nobody likes those. So instead of saying there are 100 degrees of red and green and blue light, we say there are 256. Why? You can cut 256 in half eight times! (256, 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1). Music notation uses the same set of numbers to describe arrangements of sound waves. But why stop at 256 light levels? Why not go to 512? Money. Creating monitors that can display with that degree of accuracy would be pretty expensive, and no one would know if they're accurate because we can't see there is a difference in colors until they're about 5 units apart and you know where to look. Put a red 255 next to a red 251. If you didn't know they were different, you wouldn't see any difference. So we're stuck with 16.77 million colors (256*256*256). Have fun naming all of them.
In Greek the world for Orange is Portokali, Portuguese.
i always thought green and pink purple and all that made no sence for me but purple is my favourite color tho
If my conlang had a pack of crayons
10 pack
Magenta Orange Lemon
Green Blue Purple Black
Auburn White Salmon
Magenta=red
Salmon=pink
Auburn=brown
Lemon=yellow
20 pack additions
Charcoal Silver Amber
Forest Jade Azure Navy
Indigo Lavender Plum
cyan was in among us making is a real color.
The number of colour I see there isn't infinite
It is 16.7 million
(Because 8-bit colour, so 256^3)
close enough for graphics work.. lol
so you see no colors outside your screen?
@@jarlfenrir Goddamn, not only did you correctly point out my mistake but also reminded me of a nerdy comment I made 3 years ago that I did not want to be reminded of.
@@pyrdepavkki1601 sorry
Idea: colours being more aligned with concepts or ideas
Like rust and withering brown being the same colour, but different from fur-brown, even though they would significantly overlap on the colour wheel
lamentablemente ningún idioma tiene un nombre para mi color favorito, "color esmeralda" (entre celeste y verde), no importa lo que los idiomas digan, lo defenderé como color propio hasta el último de mis días
My Conlang separates cyan/turquoise and dark blue cuse' they are basically different colours
Neymarese color words
Red
Amber(Orange)
Green
Violet(Blue)
White
Black
Compound colors
Blackwhite(Lt gray)
Blackred(Maroon)
Blackamber(Brown)
Blackgreen(Forest)
Blackviolet(Navy)
Whiteblack(Dk gray)
Whitered(Pink)
Whiteamber(Beige)
Whitegreen(Mint)
Whiteviolet(Cloud)
Redamber(Scarlet)
Greenamber(Olive)
Greenviolet(Teal)
Redviolet(Magenta)
❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
This doesn't mention cyan?
TBF, the area labeled turquoise is rather cyan
Cyan is a term used when discussing light. Blue is the laymen's term we learn in school--so it's the linguistically relevant one.
@@wdeantucker it's commonly used instead of light blue where I live.
@@wdeantucker In my experience, cyan is being recognised more and more as just a colour term the same as any other. Admittedly I have a small sample size, but that is my experience nonetheless. My hypothesis is that because of it's importance to CMYK subtractive printing, and its importance to the computers that control that, Cyan is becoming more recognised by people that interact with computers for publishing reasons - be they professional or amateur.
@@dafoex Totally agree. I would not be surprised at all if cyan became a "standard color" like blue or green by, say, 2100. But it's hard to be more precise than that since this kind of language change tends to be a very slow process. That said, I suspect it will have some difficulty supplanting more established terms like "turquoise" and "teal".
My (partially) real time reaction as a linguist/"hyperfixates on many scientific things" person to this video
0:29 WHY DID YOU SKIP OVER CYAN (witch is VERY much a color, see the comments lol)
0:48 totally, pink is more of a magenta-ish color if you're going linguisticly (is that even a real word?), while light red is just a light shade of red. However, if you were to talk about scientific colors, which we aren't, then they are the same, because magenta wouldn't exist.
1:40 no lol. THEY'RE BOTH SHADES OF YELLOW-
1:52 I personally differentiate between blue and cyan, which is close enough.
2:55 In my main conlang, Afasy (which is actually becoming my second main conlang as of rn), my fictional species who speaks this language can see ultraviolet wavelengths, so they have 3-4 different color names for those. Also yes it does differentiate between blue and cyan-
4:50 how is brown there, brown is darker-
4:50 also this graph expresses the importance of having cyan to balance out the color sections
brown deserves it's own category, but it's not the color marked on that graph
You can also use FFFFFF FFF000
Homer was blind - maybe this is why he called both the face of an oxen and the sea 'wine-coloured'. Or maybe he was talking about a bloody face and a sea of blood.
underrated video
1:54 And also Hebrew. The word for dark blue (or blue as a whole) is כחול, and the word for light blue is תכלת
And also, I heard about a conlang named Ygyde that has 64(!) color names, each representing a specific RGB value.
I remember seeing a joke conlang that requires you to say the specific RGB value of an object. So like a bee you'd have to embed 255,255,0 into the word itself with like suffixes and all that.
@@40watt53 eyyy! I made that conlang!
what about cyan
Irish shifts the colour wheel over a bit: "uaine" covers some of the yellow spectrum and is thought of as a "vivid" green like you'd use in dyes. "Glas" partly covers the teal end of blue, but it's mostly what you'd think of as "green" in English. Interestingly, "glas" is "blue" in Welsh. It also gets used for grey coloured animals, not dissimilar to how "blue" gets used to refer to grey animals in English. For some people, "glas" also covers light blues, while "gorm" is for darker shades. There's a distinct word for grey, however, which is "liath".
On the other side is the wheel, you have the two terms for "red": "dearg" covers most of what you'd think of as "red" while "rua" covers the more "orangy" and coppery shades.
Among Us is adding Cyan and Lime to our Regular Color List lol
What about Fortegreen?
inb4 "I can't fucking take it at this point, I'm literally going fucking insane" post
minecraft has those too !
Minecraft has had those for much longer
4:27
Jackson Crawford's dissertation *The Historical Development of Basic Color Terms In Old Norse-icelandic* argues that blár doesn't mean "black" or even necessarily "dark". I'd recommend having a look for anyone interested.
I’d be interested in how a language might develop amongst a universally blind culture, we can call them “batmen.”
The batmen language might develop a schema color analogous to how we discuss tones, or they might have influence from another culture that can see, in the same way that our Braille has words for colors.
If a culture was totally blind they would learn color as it relates to temperature. They would know white paint cools a roof more than black paint. But also that certain objects are transparent. With enough time scientists in a blind culture would be able to identify different colors of petals or feathers by passing them through bright light from a prism. Heat will reflect from objects at different places along the spectrum. The fact that sunburn/damage happens at different angles to the feeling of heat is also noteworthy. So even if a blind culture doesn't use color often, they still need it for technological developments and to fill in the gaps of the electromagnetic spectrum.
it may be similar to the way we discuss wavelengths of light that are invisible to us seeing people
yes, the atmosphere lets the visible spectrum pass through the atmosphere surprisingly well, but there is an equally large 'transparency window' at around ten microns, in the infrared range, and we don't bother distinguishing too much between those at least with separate words
even IR cameras are mostly translated in brightness not hue
the bee-men might call us simplistic for lumping in together so many shades as 'ultraviolet', they may just say they are more shades of violet or it's the light that has other colours like miolet and flurple or something like that
basically, i think the properties of light will be more understood without relating them to our 380-750nm brains think
also, braille is not be the best example as it's simply a writing system, the perceptions of colours already is pre-cooked by extensive conversation from seeing people and massive influence from the seeing world
i think some of these batmen who are in close dialogue with seers may be familiar with the concepts of each colour and will find it curious that we have names like 'purple' for combinations of different wavelengths, or that we can be tricked by three colours put together, or all other ways in which colour influences our culture, but besides the cultural curiosity they will not need to be immediately familiar with apparently tiny disctinctions to such a degree that it influences common language
irradiating heat (warm infrared), bee-light, seer-light, microwaves, etc.
I don't see any reason they would develop any schema for color at all. Why invent names for things that effectively don't even exist in your world? It's the same as how ancient humans never developed terms for different radio frequencies, or the feel of the Earth's magnetic field...
If they had exposure to other cultures which could see, then they might adopt some terms for these (theoretical) concepts, but then they would most likely just adopt terms from the language(s) of the other cultures, I think, so their view of color would basically end up depending entirely on what the other culture's view of color was anyway.
When they reached a certain level of technology, yes, they might need to develop ways to describe it, but at that point you're really just talking about describing an arbitrary part of the electromagnetic spectrum. They'd probably refer to it much the same way we do with radio waves (by talking about something equivalent to "the 500nm band" or some such). We don't invent new words for every increment of every small slice of the EM spectrum we study, so why would they?
I used this video to create a different colour "hierarchy" based on Berlin and Kay. The colours it does and doesn't have may seem odd, but that's because the language's speakers, being related to canines rather than humans, cannot distinguish between red and green.
lalagyh- white (from a word meaning 'to sparkle', originally from a word meaning 'star')
kalashyh - black (from a word meaning 'nothing')
tashilyh - dark brown (from a word meaning 'blood'). applies to reds and dark browns.
gerakyh - light brown (from a demonym of the speakers, due to their fur colour). applies to light browns, oranges, and greens.
gerakyh lalag - yellow (meaning 'sparkling light brown'). initially a shade of gerakyh but considered its own colour despite the name.
kalikyh - blue (from a word meaning 'sky'). applies to blue and purple.
Colors in Argentinian:
Rojo,Roço(red)
Naranja,Arantyone(orange)
Amariglio,Gliallo(yellow)
Verde(green)
Asul Turquesa(light blue)
Blu,Asul Mariño(dark blue)
Violeta(purple)
Rosa(pink)
Cafè,Marronebrown)
Nero(black)
Bianco(white)
Gri(fem) and Griglio(masc) for grey
Other spellings used in loanwords from Italy
The Bulgarian word for "red" comes from "intestine"
not a conlanger but i found this video very interesting as a casual linguistics enjoyer
Well done. You video cleared up a philosophical argument between mi son and I will let people know about your channel. It was very interesting as well as very informative. An entertaining to boot
Pastor Mark Honas
Great video that could have been so much longer - it just scratches the surface. All the described examples are simply variants of mapping light of a particular wavelength to a name. Some languages use other factors than purely the objective wavelength though. Take Hungarian: piros and vörös would both translate to 'red' in English, but the distinction isn't one of hue but of context. Piros is generally used for things man-made and/or detached from emotion, and vörös for natural and/or emotional things. So piros tulipán (red tulip, non-emotional) but vörös rózsa (red rose, associated with love and passion). They can even be used with the same noun, so piros lámpás is a red traffic light, but vörös lámpás is the kind of red light illuminating ladies of negotiable virtue.
Even in English you get echoes of this in the way scarlet or crimson sound more passionate than say cherry red. I'm sure there are a lot more things like this just waiting for someone to elaborate.
What about cyan?
Due to using Mspaint for like, 15 years, and loving 'full' colors, usually I think of: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Denim, Cyan, Blue, Purple, Magenta, and Rose
I made a conlang with 14 color terms:
Bright red
Deep red(auburn)
Yellow
Bright green
Deep green
Bright blue
Deep blue
Bright purple
Deep purple
Pink
Golden
Silver
White(pastel)
Black
In my conlang "vapazuzu" means charcoal(light black) and "zuzuvapa" means silver(dark white)
If Algicosathlon was in Toki Pona
Laso telo(blue)
Laso kasi(green)
Jelo(yellow)
Loje(red)
Pimeja(black)
Walo(white)
Laso(teal)
Walo pimeja(gray)
Loje walo(pink)
Jelo pimeja(brown)
Laso sewi(sky blue)
Loje laso(magenta)
Loje jelo(orange)
Loje telo(blood red,crimson)
Jelo kiwen(gold)
Loje kili(raspberry,purple red)
Jelo kili(banana,light yellow)
Loje seli(flame red,scarlet)
I've always found it weird no language differentiates between light brown and dark brown
I said 9 colours on the colour wheel 💀💀💀💀💀,
Green, Yellow, Red, Blue, Cyan, White, Grey, Black
Out of all the colours, I don't get why light blue isn't universally different in all languages from dark blue, it just looks so different from dark blue. Light blue looks more different from dark blue than brown does from orange.
Yeah brown is just slightly darker orange of course light blue and dark blue are more different.
In my language there is distinction between dark and light blue, but for me those are too similar to have different names. However brown always was totally different than orange for me!
@@jarlfenrir you might be colorblind
@@ExzaktVid why? Becasue I see more difference between two colors you treat as similar?
Ancient Greek has the word "oino" which means dark blue
3:29 Archaeologists have discovered, from residual particles left in amphorae salvaged from shipwrecks, that in ancient Greece, the wine was actually what we today would call 'blue' in color! Also, the cattle that were bred for leather and meat in Bronze Age Greece were a particular species of auroch, noted for its steel blue-colored faces and jowls.
Who knew!!?
Also in spanish : Azul Blue and Celeste (light blue)
interesting
Magenta, it’s not pink, and it’s not purple.
For me it looks like a "reddish purple", so somewhat in a purple category.
2:40 SNIPER WOLF HIPOTESIS????????
My language has six terms:
Black,White,Red,Orange,Green,Blue
Black=darkest grays and hues
White=lightest grays and hues
Red=reddish or warm hues
Green=greenish or cool hues
Orange=yellowish hues of red
Blue=purplish hues of green
In Korean, at least south Korean, blue is 파란색 and light blue or sky-blue is 하늘색 which means sky-color.
Lichen has a video on taxonomy, and it covers colors, including languages as examples for his said tongues categorize colors.
I think it would be interesting if they had 3 colours (red/orange yellow/light green dark green/blue/purple)
I have ELVES HEEEEELP
Check out the study Genetic and Functional Odorant Receptor Variation in the Homo Lineage (or an article on it)
It’s about scent* perception in prehistory hominid species like neandrathals and denisovans. To sum it up, we used DNA from those extinct hominid species to recreate their olfactory receptors, and tested them out. All three species, humans, neandrathals, and denisovans could smell the same things, but had different sensitivities to different types of smell. Denisovans were more perceptive to the scent of honey for example, likely because it was consumed more by them. The point is to think of what the elves in your setting do, and what’s important to them, and think about which colors they may be more or less perceptive to the distinctions of
*which you may also be interested in for scent terminology, some natural languages have scent terms with as clear boundaries as color terms, like the Aslian language family
Italian not only makes distincion between two shades of blue, it makes distinction between three of them.
_Blu_ is the word for dark blue. Light blue is called either _azzurro_ or _celeste_ : normally the latter is used for a very light blue.
teal gets no respect
💜💜💜💜💜💜
But wasn't Homer blind?
This is not proved at all. In fact, we cannot even be completely sure whether he existed (as a single person) and when he lived.
@@obviativ123 Fair enough.
In polish, we have three words for blue.
błękitny- light blue
niebieski- blue
granatowy- very dark blue
All three are used in everyday life.
Interestingly, "niebieski" doesn't have a nominalisation, while the other two do.
as for my taste, "błękitny" is not distinct from blue, just a lighter shade. And I hear more often people saying "light blue" (jasny niebieski) than "błękitny".
There Are Two Types Of English Speakers, Those Who See Gold As A Unique Colour From Yellow And Orange, And Those Who Do Not.
also silver can be distinguishable from gray.
@@jarlfenrir I feel like Silver qualifies as a shade of Grey (Or blue lol), Whereas Gold is a totally distinct colour, With shades of its own.