Sunshine Challenge 2020 - Prompt 4 (Green) - Take 2

[greerwatson]

As someone who likes green, I look at it in comparison with other colours, and I think it gets sadly short-changed. I mean, just consider this:

YELLOW			YELLOW
ORANGE			GREEN
RED			GREEN
BROWN			GREEN

I mean, sure, we have names for the different greens. I'd call the lighter one "lime" and the muted one "olive". But they are still considered to be types of green. Suppose you had T-shirts striped like this:





The first one is striped in orange & yellow, the second in red & yellow, and the third in brown & yellow. However, as far as the others are concerned, if you were given any one of them on its own, you'd probably describe it as being green & yellow.

Of course, we do have names for specific shades of green: ivy green, spruce green, emerald green, spinach green and so on; but these are comparable to "canary yellow", "daffodil yellow", "sunshine yellow", and the like. The point is that lime is as different as orange, and olive as different as brown; but neither is considered to be a totally separate colour.

In fact, it gets more complicated when we look at colours that lie between lime (on the one hand) and orange (on the other hand) and pure yellow. Colours that are almost yellow.





You can run a sequence of interpolating these shades between yellow and either orange or (lime) green:









But if you compare them instead with red and its equivalent shade of green, they look practically yellow! (But not quite.)









When you look at them all together, you can see that they're the missing part of the sequence: you need these additional colours in order to get a proper gradation.





They don't have separate names, though. There really aren't enough names for colours.

Comments

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

And some languages don't even have a word specifically for green- blue and green are timesharing in some languages.

[greerwatson]

You mean like Berlin & Kay's Basic Color Terms? From which I gather that such languages tend to have fewer colour terms overall.

Still, when green and blue share the same basic word, that doesn't mean people can't differentiate specific shades (e.g. "leaf gr/ue" vs "sky gr/ue"). However, it does seem to me that their colour term really means something more ike "all cool/fresh tones".

I gather other languages combine light green with yellow; or light green, yellow, and orange. Which I guess is basically "bright tones", as compared to "hot" or "dark/cold".

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Note:I'm not fluent in any languages with this feature. And it's a feature my prof was insufficiently aware of that his ethnographic projects never delved into it.

Orange is a specificity of color with historical antecedents in English--it existed before that but without the name.

I seem to recall there is a green indigo will make with specialized mordanting, though it could be stage it looks green but dries blue. (I never dyed with indigo, it's a very specialized process.)

Arsenic green was very famous as a wall paper color (I think that's the 'modern' term, just to remind people to Be Careful. The actual names might be too seductive.)

But yeah, the intimation is that some languages have fewer color terms. Again, I don't know the languages used as examples, and have come to question how much of what's been found is artifacts of what was taken in by those looking.

[greerwatson]

As long as people aren't literally (i.e. biologically) colour-blind, then all the colours exist, whether you have a name for them or not. The question, though, is how—if you have a name for them—that affects how well you distinguish them from other colours.

With Berlin & Kay, given that (like you) I don't know most of the languages they cite, I can't say how much their source material was affected by the mother tongue of the sociologists and linguists doing the research they drew on. One thing stuck out like a sore thumb, though. When they dealt with languages that had more basic colour terms than either Berlin or Kay themselves, they immediately had real doubt about it. Because of course no language could have more basic colour terms than English!

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I am drawn to Homer's wine dark sea which I seem to recall was associated with some of these sorts of questions, even though as of itself in belongs at the last prompt. ;)

I've had people misunderstand what it means to gain a color word, whether that's picking up one to split the load with the pre-existing hardest-working or gaining orange.

English isn't particularly creative with its color word roster, excepting the raft of specialist terms it acquired along with the empires they resided in.

"Quick, hide the vocabulary, the English are coming!