How the Colors Got Their Names | Otherwords
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
- The earliest humans didn't have words for colors... and the way they evolved follow a remarkably similar path across cultures.
Otherwords is a PBS web series on Storied that digs deep into this quintessential human trait of language and finds the fascinating, thought-provoking, and funny stories behind the words and sounds we take for granted. Incorporating the fields of biology, history, cultural studies, literature, and more, linguistics has something for everyone and offers a unique perspective on what it means to be human.
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Host: Erica Brozovsky, Ph.D.
Creator/Director: Andrew Matthews & Katie Graham
Writer: Andrew Matthews
Producer: Katie Graham
Editor/Animation: Andrew Matthews
Executive Producer: Amanda Fox
Fact Checker: Yvonne McGreevy
Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: John Campbell
Stock Images from Shutterstock
Music from APM Music
Otherwords is produced by Spotzen for PBS.
© 2023 PBS. All rights reserved.
Just when I thought Bears couldn't get any more badass, now I learn they are basically like some kind of unnamable lovecraftian entity to ancient Europeans.
Wolves too - ancient Romans and some early European peoples also gave them nicknames (along the lines of “lobo”) because it was too dangerous to mention this predator by name.
Like we say The Good People.
The Indo-European root for bear is *rkto-, and we can apply typical Germanic sound shifts to make educated guesses. If it followed typical shifts, it would have been *urhtaz in Proto-Germanic - and the typical shifts into Old English could have made this word into *urht, *orht, *roht, or *rought.
Compare to “arth” (used in Welsh/Cornish) or “artch” (used in Armenian).
In Slavic languages, the bear is the "honey-eater", by the same logic
It's also common for hunters to avoid using the proper name of the animal they are hunting.
Fun fact: The French 'blanc', meaning 'white', ultimately traces back to the same PIE root as the English word 'black'. One took the meaning of brightness out of the fire that burns, the other took the meaning of darkness from the result of the burning.
Same with many of the romance languages words for white: Spanish - blanca, Portuguese - branca, Italian - bianca.
I'm not educated in the area, but my opinion is that Old Norse "blikr" meaning ash-colored has something to do with that. It was used to mean light colors like pale yellow (deep yellow was considered red), white, light pink, pale blue, light grey etc., but maybe the coals in ashes would also be called blikr.
What about blank in English does it come from that? becuace if you think of a blank x then you think of a pure white x
@@luzellemoller6621you are right. Black and blank has the same root word, back then people didn't really know what exactly is the color or "burnt"? Is it the whitish ash or the charred black soot? Blank, bleach, and various words in italian/spanish like bianca are white.
English have always been so PESSIMISTIC
Pink used to mean a yellow-green color. Pinking is cutting the edge of fabric in a zigzag to prevent fraying. Dianthus flower petals have a zigzag edge and so they were called pink for their shape. As everyone was referring to this light red flower as pink that eventually became the color name.
CITATION NEEDED!
@@BlackIndigenousPosse en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink
“The color pink is named after the flowers, pinks,[7] flowering plants in the genus Dianthus, and derives from the frilled edge of the flowers. The verb "to pink" dates from the 14th century and means "to decorate with a perforated or punched pattern" (possibly from German picken, "to peck").[8] It has survived to the current day in pinking shears, hand-held scissors that cut a zig-zagged line to prevent fraying.”
@@kelzbelz313What about "pink" formerly referring to a yellow-green color?
& Blue meant “Wine Dark “in Ancient Greek.
@@ROBYNMARKOW well not exactly, the greeks didnt have a name for the color blue so described blue things like the sky or sea as wine
You know I’m here for Otherwords
I mostly watch monstrum
Yaass!!!!
A thing that always stuck out to me about the linguistic color evolution theory was that it seems to closely follow the perception of the three cones of the human eye in ascending order. Red comes first to be described, then the mix of yellow/green (next cone frequency) to distinguish it as the "non-red" color, which splits yet a third time when the third cone (blue) comes into play in the language. This closely follows the pattern of the rods which are most sensitive at 564nm (red), 534nm (green), and finally 420nm (blue). Rods of the eyes, which only detect along the black-white spectrum peak around 498mn, so between the blue and the red/green bunch.
It's also worth noting that for each subsequent cone up from red, the less frequent it occurs: 64% for red-sensitivity, ~32% green , ~2% are blue (though cool fast, blue cones peak the furthest away from the red-green bunch and are the most sensitive).
Interesting!
Very well said. I thought of human evolution, particularly of sight, when I watched this video.
Here in Indonesia, the color pink is usually translated into "merah muda". If you translate "merah muda" word-by-word back into English, you'll get either light red or bright red.
young red 😅
Same in in Irish. Pink in Irish is “bándearg”, literally white-red
I studied in italy in the aughts and while learning italian I was only taught "azzuro" to mean blue. Going back just under nine years later I noticed that "blu" had subplanted azzuro for darker blues making azzuro exclussive to light blues
Russian also has separate words for light blue and dark blue, in the same way English distinguishes between pink and red. (Most Romance languages simply use some version of “rose” - i.e. naming the hue after the flower like we name reddish-yellow after the orange fruit.)
I watched another video that described it like we would use pink and red. Yeah pink is light red but most English speakers don't categorize pink in that way.
@@stannieholt8766is it голубой and синий?
Isn't Cyan the most suitable word for light blue?
@@hieraticscyan is another word also, “ciano”, but it refers to a more greenish blue. Just Light blue is called “azzurro”
In the orange case, it was the same for its color in Arabic, but by another way
In Arabic it’s burtaqaly برتقالي from the fruit burtaqal برتقال (the y at the end transforms a noun in an adjective), but this comes from the name Portugal
It’s similar to turquoise in English, which comes from the stone, named from Turk/ottoman traders
I love this connections
This is very interesting: in Greek they say portolaki πορτοκάλι (fruit and color), in Romanian we say portocaliu (color) and portocala (fruit).
@@bloodofkvasir in Turkish it’s also portakal. Maybe it’s an influence from Greek?
I have searched and searched (for about 5 min :)) ) but did not cleared the origin of the word: was it from Greeks, Turkish or Valencians...?@@gwyndolinds-en8yt
Could you do an episode on what we know about the PIE language itself? I'd be fascinated to learn more about it
It is kind of hard to do that honestly without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.
Especially if you delve into the grammar ⛓📜 and early writing systems it had.
@@UniDocs_Mahapushpa_Cyavana Ah. That sucks
I'd be interested in a PIE episode, too
Not just what we know but how we know it. Must be fascinating.
UniDocs isn't wrong exactly, but there's plenty of good stuff, especially when you get into the "how we know" that TathD would like to see. It does get fascinating. One of my recent favorites is that the lox from a "bagel and lox" is likely the almost unchanged word for salmon.
As an artist, I love this episode. And thanks for explaining why green to blue have so little names dispirited having vastly more colors then the warms. It is madding to me trying to tell my favorite shades of cool colors.
Learn Munsell notation. You'll love it.
You should have mentioned of Cyan and Magenta, because most people consider Cyan a Blue-Green color (like orange used to be yellow-red) or light blue, despite being a color on its own. And Magenta being confused with pink or purple, but also being a color of its own (or actually not a color at all, as it is outside the visible spectrum)
Magenta is the name of a perceived color, but does not exist as a wavelength of light. Instead, the color of magenta is created by the visual system receiving simultaneous input of red and blue light.
@@larrymorin4841It’s weird. A lot of the time people see magenta and say it’s pink. But they also like to say pink is light red. But it’s not lighter shade of red ‘magenta’ is a completely different perceived hue!
The fact that we can name a color that doesn’t exist is just incredible
I’m so happy Dr. Erica mentioned Artist and designer instead of that done to death joke about girls knowing more colours.
Yes 🫰🏼
We need a Otherwords show for latin branch languages 😮
I love watching this
I agree they should. Considering how differently Classical Latin sounds compared to most languages in its family. For example the V in Classical Latin was pronounced as W. Also the C was always pronounced as a K with no exception.
@@Mackyle-Wotring Meaning the title "Caesar" should be pronounced as the German title "Kaiser."
@@tygrkhat4087
Yep. Although when pronouncing the name you also pronounce the A as a long A. Interestingly enough other languages have the name "Caesar" pronounced with a k sound. Including Arabic (Qaysar), Hebrew (Qêsār), Latvian (Ķeizars), Punjabi (Kaisara), Chinese (Kǎisǎ), Armenian (Kesar), Persian (Qaysar), Georgian (K’eisari), Ukrainian (Kayzer), Zulu (uKhesari), Ormoro (Qeesaar), Shona (Kesari), Amharic (K’ēsari), Japanese (Kaesaru), Swahili (Kaisari), Greek (Kaísaras), Sanskrit (Kaisara), Urdu (Qaisar), Hindi (Kaisar), Korean (Kaisaleu), Uyghur (Qeyser), Kazakh (Qaysar) (that version of the name also means Courageous), Hawaiian (Kaisara), Tajik (Qajsar), Tatar (Qaysar), Finnish (Keisari), Swedish (Kejsaren), Icelandic (Keisar/Keisarinn), Tibetan (Kha'e sa'e ), Kurdish (Qeyser), Coptic (Kaisar), Telegu (Kaijar), and many others.
There is also another thing to mention about the Latin the I would sometimes make the Y sound if it is in front of a vowel.
~Mackyle Wotring
So violets are blue because there was no word for purple (violet)
Great video! Thank you!
"Unless you're a designer or an artist you only use about ten or so colour words..." Or, unless you've been getting L.L. Bean and Land's End catalogues for decades. If ya know, ya know. 😉
Another observation: babies react FIRST to black and white toys, then to colors, in order of red, green and then blue. (This is also affected by what colors they're surrounded by of course, since stimulation plays a huge part in infant development). I'm seeing a comment in here too about the frequency of cones and rods in the eyes, which I think correlates to the brain's development also? So it makes even more sense that early humans, and their language, took on the oldest, clearest, most vital concepts first.
But no matter what names they go by, colors are still wonderful!
It does. Until they are 6 or 7 months old, babies can only see black, white, and red. That is why the coolest baby toys are in those 3 colors, because it's all they can see.
The interesting thing about colour and language is that languages that don't have a word for a color such as pink, have a hard time distinguishing pink from other similar colors.
That's actually true of people in general. The more color words a person uses the more nuanced their ability to perceive the variances in different tones. Even if they are technically using the incorrect color word, as long as the person has a examples in mind it trains the brain to pick out the differences. Women, in general, can differentiate colors better than men. Women tend to use more precise color names than men.
I didn't know that about languages and people missing whole categories, but it makes sense based on what I read about individuals and limitations based on word usage.
I feel like I've heard something similar - some languages (I want to say including Chinese and Japanese) don't treat green and blue as separate colors, so people who speak those languages have a harder time differentiating them.
colours and how we divide them does vary somewhat between cultures. greeks regularly classify orange as a kind of red, and they distinguish galazio (sky blue) from ble (shorter wavelengths of blue: ultramarine, navy blue, indigo). if they need to distinguish, greeks have a word for orange portoka'li, derived from the fruit porto'kali, which comes from "Portugal".
japanese has specific words for white, black red, yellow, green, blue and purple. many colours are directly named after things, "peach colour" for pink, "tea colour" for brown, "ash colour" for grey, "orange (fruit) colour" for orange.
Oh how colorful this latest banger of an episode made my day today!
Fun thing : cochineal hides under and produces the white fuzzy stuff you'll sometimes see on cactus
...and the cactus dies.
In my native Swedish, we have an alternative word for orange: brandgul. It means ”fire yellow”, but isn’t really used anymore. I remember old people using it when I was a kid some 30 years ago, but everyone just says ”orange” now (pronounced ”oransh”, like the French).
Bradgul. The balrog's more fearsome cousin.
fire yellow sounds awesome
It’s wild to me that Blue is lower on the color language scale than Green bc I remember when learning Japanese, Blue and Green were often lumped together under Blue (and sometimes even green in traffic lights is called blue). It’s not 100% of the time now bc there is a separate word for green in modern Japanese, but that wasn’t always the case. Very much a guide than a rule!
I would guess that the fact that the making the distinction came as late as it did in Japanese is probably a part of why the older word went the opposite way compared to most languages.
Funfact: I'm currently reading The Iliad by Homer and when they're talking about the sea it's not described as being blue, it's wine-dark.
@@currykingwurst6393 If I recall correctly, to classical Greeks, blue was a shade of green, so the sea and the sky were considered to be green
In my country (Indonesia) we also have an ethnic group that does similar thing too. For them, blue and purple is one word, and green is nonexistent. So for them, the sky is purple and plant leaves are blue.
My Japanese wife will often tell me the lights have turned 'blue' in English, just because its been so in-grained in her language model - even after speaking English outside Japan for nearly 25 years
It's interesting that "blue" is such a late addition to languages as a whole. When I was learning Japanese, I was taught they didn't have a word for green (midori) until fairly recently. Green and blue were lumped together under blue (ao). Apparently, because of this, Japanese people have a harder time distinguishing between green and blue than other cultures. I actually saw an example of this when I did my study abroad in Japan. I was at a crosswalk and overheard a mom asking their child, who looked to be about 3 years old, what color the stoplight was. The child enthusiastically shouted "Aoiro!" (blue color), and the mom said that's right.
y'all never fail to put a smile on my face and interest in my mind, keep up the amazing work!!
As of kid, I had been fascinated of the names of the colors in a large Crayola box
This was amazing! Always down for a short, fun video from you guys! This one speaks to me simply because I like to "art" in my free time.
Now I'm interested in how words of color evolved in my native Finnish. Only orange seems to have any kind of link to English (but is probably loaned from Swedish or German). Also, the bear name is interessting. Do have a similar history for it. Our relationship with them seems to have been quite different. I even have a brick of a tome about old poems about bears, which probably only exists because they had such a strong religious importance to us.
Dutch? The Dutch are ruled by the House of Orange, and Orange is strongly associated with Protestantism.
My favorite Crayola crayon color in the '70s was Burnt Sienna.
Hearing that pronunciation of “gealoread” broke my Old English heart.
Gyellored. I'm going to use it along with 'murrey' for a sort of purplish-brown found in heraldry.
The "G" in Anglo-Saxon is pronounced as essentially a "Y" sound, so the Geoluhread comes out even closer to "yellow-red" phonetically. The "J" sound for "G" comes from French and is heard more in Middle-English than in Anglo-Saxon which has harder consonants, much like Latin.
I came to the comments to see if anyone else already pointed this out before I wrote a comment saying the same thing haha
As a Filipino growing up in a city in the southwestern part or area of the Philippines, I rarely heard other Filipinos older than me, even my fellow elementary students or pupils way back when I was still in elementary school, use the word "purple" for any color with a mix of red and blue or any color in between red and blue.
I remember that we would just and almost always call or refer to it as "violet", and sometimes if it's more bluish, bluer, or leaning towards blue, then it's "indigo" or even just "blue", and while growing up from elementary school to high school in the mid- to late 2000s to the early to mid-2010s, I remember that I personally can't differentiate a "violet" from a "purple and vice versa, so I just thought they're just the same color and that the latter color is just the fancier name or version of the former color.
Later on, I remember that I just thought that "violet" is more bluish or is bluer than "purple" and that "purple" is more reddish or is redder than "violet" but not as more reddish or redder as "maroon" and a "red-violet", and I also remember that I just treated "purple" the same as a bluer "red-violet" or a bluer "maroon", or as a darker, more intense, or more vivid "lavender".
Now, "purple" for me is the color "violet" but with a little more red and with a brighter, more intense, or more vivid color.
Interesting point. I'm in the same gen, 2000s to 2010s elementary to highschool. We didn't differentiate purple from violet either, just called it violet or ube up north.
I'm sure I've said this a bunch of times, but I love the retro opening animation. Takes me back to watching PBS on broadcast TV as a kid.
The phased glasses was mint 👌🤌🤌
It's a good thing no one remembers the real name for bears. If we ever figure it out, it's gonna be all over. The bears will come for us.
I know purple was a much later addition, but from "the seven colors" its place is taken up by both indigo and violet, which I never really leaned to differentiate, as purple seemed more logical as a sixth color to me. I'm surprised you didn't mention indigo and violet, especially where the notions came from and where they disappeared off to.
Pink is thought to have a calming effect. One shade known as "drunk-tank pink" is sometimes used in prisons to calm inmates. While pink's calming effect has been demonstrated, researchers of color psychology have found that this effect only occurs during the initial exposure to the color.
The G in geoluhread was pronounced like a Y. Old English G's became Y sounds in front of front vowels (dæg=day). So geoluhread was pronounced very similarly to yellowred. Love the videos btw
I thought the bear taboo was older than old English, since other Germanic languages use the "brown" reference. And other Indo-European languages use different euphemisms.
The funny thing is, I use more words for blue than any other color. Blue is so rich and has so many variants to me, from navy to teal, cyan, aquamarine, to sky blue and baby blue...other colors I just tend to say if they are dark, light, or neon colored lol
In Sweden, in the early seventies, when I was in kindergarten, the common word for the colour "orange" was "brand-gul". Literal translation: fire yellow. "Orange" (the colour) was used too, but I had a book about colours where orange (the fruit) was described as "brandgul". I just asked my daughter, born 2004. She had to think long and hard to recall hearing "brandgul" back when she was in kindergarten.
Fun fact: orange the fruit is called "apelsin". We said "apelsin-gul" too, rather than "orange".
When I was little, I thought the colors came from the Paul Williams song "I Can Sing a Rainbow".
Funny enough, in Portuguese, at least in Brazil, the color orange is called "laranja" (orange) or "abóbora" (pumpkin).
Ps: It is also commonly used as "cor de laranja/abóbora" (color of Orange/pumpkin)
It's so fascinating that the development of colour words kinda mirrors their order by light wavelength! Also 5:10 the ancient word for bear was actually lost quite a while before Old English - 'bear' goes back as far as Proto-Germanic *bero, also the origin of Swedish 'björn', German 'Bär' and so on. The original lost PIE word was *h₂r̥tḱo- (which survived in other IE branches - Latin 'ursus', Greek 'arktos' etc.). Had that word persisted in Germanic, the modern English word for bear could theoretically have been something like 'rax', 'rought', 'arrow', or 'arx' depending on the nuances of the sound changes (I worked that out once cause I'm a nerd)
In Sanskrit bear is ṛkṣas (ऋक्षस्). There is another newer word in Sanskrit: Bhalluka (भल्लुक). The modern Hindi bhālū (भालू) is derived from bhalluka.
"Mabel Land's rainbows have colors that only bees and art-students can see!"
So did my grandmother's afghans
2:54 Extreme example of ad-hoc explanation: we have no idea, but we can tweak the data so that it accommodates to any hypothesis we may develop and seem like we know something.
Every day I see more videos on something radiolab brilliantly covered.
4:05 Oh my gosh!!! The portuguese word for orange is laranja, I had no idea that's where it came from. I'm surprised you didn’t mention it.
There could be a HUGE number of words for colors - over a *_vermilion,_* even!
This video was so awesome. Thank you.
Funny how narang word comes from the Sanskrit but the westernisation and colonisation has impacted the Indian subcontinent in a way people have forgotten their roots
This was fascinating and I enjoyed it immensely, but one color that seems (to me) notably absent, leaving my curiosity not fully-sated: grey.
I heard an anecdote once (not sure if it was true or not) where some folks tried to be very careful not to describe the colour of the sky to their daughter, or have it described to her as blue or anything. Not sure how they managed that in this day and age. At any rate, the anecdote I heard was that at age five when they asked the daughter what colour the sky was, she looked at them, confused, and said it had no (inherent) colour, that it was colourless. I think about that a lot, because while yes sometimes the sky seems very colourful, like a bright clear day or at sunrise or sunset, most of the time at least where I live it does seem colourless - and more or less it kinda is, though getting into the philosophy of colour is beyond a RUclips comment I think. I just find that anecdote fascinating and kinda wish we were taught that the sky was inherently colourless. I dunno, it just feels right to me.
As someone who doesn't have a favourite colour, but does have very strong opinions about different shades and hues of colours, I'm very glad for the hundreds+ of words to describe what I actually mean 😊
How I love listening to Dr B!
i feel like a lot of the older generation (like grandparents or great grandparents) used green to describe both blue and green
Amarillo, the word for yellow in Spanish, comes from the word "amarguito" (little bitter). Related to the color and taste of the bile in animals.
@2:52 Hunter Green (dark green), Chartreuse (between yellow and green), Jade green (jewel tone deep green)
Emerald, kelly, moss, celadon, seafoam, mint, juniper, forest, pine,...
Also, in our digital age, every color can be described by 3 values: red intensity, green intensity, and blue intensity. These intensity values are usually in hexadecimal, which represent values in the range of 0 to 1 (or 0% to 100%).
Please make more videos about word's story, etymology etc.
every time, i learn interesting information about words. thank you for expanding my knowledge and helping me learn more wonderful words.
On her warm/cool color wheel:
I would consider purple to be a “cool” color
And, maybe because of decades of working with computer graphics, I consider cyan, and magenta, to be very distinct colors (and I consider magenta to be a “warm” color
It all boils down to characterizing what’s important to the user
The words for pink are close in many languages [but not Eng], and close to the word red, and pink derives from the word for the rose flower. In Bulgarian pink is rozovo [розово]. In Polish it sounds like rozovi. In Russian its rozoviy. In Ukranian its rozheviy. In Czech and Belarusian sounds like ruzhovi. In Serbian its roze. In Croatian it sounds like ruzhichasta. In Slovak it sounds like ruzhova. In Slovene its roze, so almost the same in all Slavic languages. I think in German and Spanish it's rosa. Pink is worth a whole seperate video!
Also its cool that you mentioned the bear and how it lost its true name due to the taboo! The new name for the bear in Russian derived from the expression ,,honey-eater''.
In French and Portuguese, too, the word for pink comes from the rose. 😊 I would love a video all about pink. 💖
@@afirewasinmyhead My favorite color is purple, but I don't know what to say about it 😀
Doesn't German have two pinks, one "rosa" and the other... "pink" ?
@@sallomon2357 I don't really speak German. Maybe they're the same thing, but pink has turned into a permanent denizen in the language. Eng is conquering the world.
@@сесилияалександрова I just remember it this way from learning German in secondary school, maybe it changed a bit from that time 🤷♀️
Now, I want to know the origin of the french words for the colors, like blanc, noir, vert, jaune, mauve and violet.
The name cluster in many European languages: John, Bjorn, Ian, Iain, Jan, Art, Arthur, all have antecedents that hint at the original word for bear. Nothing is certain, though.
Interestingly, there is a similar situation with the word for bear in Russian language. It’s original name also was a taboo, and the animal came to be known as «медведь» (“medved’”), aka “one who knows where the honey is”
She mentioned the Portuguese people, but not the fact that the Portuguese word "laranja" (which means "orange") also has received this initial letter "L" due to the article, like "l'arancia" in Italian, which precisely means "the orange".
Fun fact: Portuguese is one of the youngest Romance languages, so it's only natural that it had been affected the most as time went by.
RUclips is weird showing me short of a completely stick figure animation talking about orange 🍊 and it’s color origin then me stumbling upon this video of a channel that I haven’t watched in months, also just love linguistics since that was my major.
My biggest flex is that i already knew how the color orange got its name
i would say that cyan is now entering regular english vocabulary by virtue of technology, giving us more cool-color words
In German, yellow is gelb, which resembles the PIE root; and purple is purpur.
Oh wow the intro to Lateralus by Tool makes way more sense
Was anyone else taken about when Erica said red hair and red robins were clearly the color of an orange? When I look at an orange I see yellow-red but when I see red hair I see a brown-red. Does anyone else see them that way, or am I the only one.
4:05 ''Naranja' in Spanish, 'narancia' in Italian and oRaNgE in french 😂😂
Ukrainian has a separate word for redheads, "рудий" (rud(yi)) which is the same root "rud" as red. But red in Ukrainian is "cherwon(yi)" which came from "cherv" - worm, as worms were used in production of red pigment. Rudyi previously meant red, then red-yellow (when chervinyi appeared) but then oranges arrived and a word for red-yellow is now "pomaranch(evyi)" wich came from French pomme d'orange. Thanks for making me research this just now)))
Thank you! Some presenters have tried to interpret the developmental hierarchy of color words to mean that speakers of those languages couldn't "see" those colors. (No word for "blue" yet? Guess they couldn't see the color of the sky... ARGH!) As you so rightly point out, it's whether or not there is a need to express that color difference on a regular basis in language.
There's also the very fundamental issue of individual sensory interpretation. The color I "see" may not be the Pantone equivalent of the color you "see", but it doesn't matter because we've learned to identify that hue socially by a specific color word.
The fact that the original name of bears was so terrfying that it was lost to history is honestly kinda metal.
This is fascinating!
This was a really interesting video that I am very glad I watched. I'd be curious to learn about how color words developed outside of the Indo-European language family--Chinese or Japanese or the Semitic languages.
TechnologyConnections made a great video about how orange and brown are essentially the same color.
Thank you
Green is my all time favorite color.
The word orange already existed in French for hundreds of years as the name of a principality, which would explain the misinterpreted syllabation.
I learned so much from your videos. Today I learned where the word bear came from.
Pink is very recent I think. Previously thought of as light red it is now thought of mostly as a colour of its own. Even though its still just light red. Perhaps the fault of lipstick makers?
We regards pink and red as different colors, even though pink is light red. I've heard that, in Russian, light blue and dark blue have different names and are regarded as quite different from each other.
I love these videos!! Thank you! 😊❤
"Bhleg" is also used for purple
Was that a "do you love the color of the sky?" reference???
Yeah we can see that ancient Chinese uses the same word for black and blue, and similar linguistic phenomenon can be seen in some regional dialects/languages under the Chinese language group
I believe these days, brent and berlins colour theory has been somewhat questioned
4:03 Orange is not pronounced "naraanja" but with a hard g (like in good). Its actually naa-run-gi in Sanskrit
Thank you.
4:07 Speaking of rebracketting and colours: I believe that 'azure' maybe comes from 'lapis *lazuli*' and that it lost the 'l' via the similarity with French articles?
Random fact: my spouse has congenital glaucoma, and because of that has some trouble with identifying colors. First the quite dark and quite light shades have blurred into "dark" and "light." Now the brighter shades are fading out too, unfortunately. (But hey, he can still see them a little after 50ys) The hues he sees the best at any point in his life are the brightest, most intense warm colors, red, yellow, pink, and orange.
Funnily enough, our lad is blue-green colorblind, like my father. (Otherwise his sight is perfectly fine). I don't know anyone who can't tell red from orange if they also can't tell blue from green.
"Kweit people can't dance"
"Sick blehg bros!"
"All that ghel's is gold"
So how did they describe the color of the sky and the ocean before they started using "blue"?
I absolutely love this
10 / 10 best show on youtube.
4:56 The middle ages? Dont the germanic languages basically all share the same root for "bear"? As in "Bär" (German), "Björn" (Swedish). So did they develop it independenly? It would seem the simpler explaination that they developed it together some time during Proto-germanic times. But I did not do any research, I might be wrong.
Killed it
The thumbnail made me think this but still watched before commenting! The word in the thumbnail looks an awful lot like the danish word gulerod, literally "yellow red", but is the word for a carrot. I think I can guess which came first in that instance 😉