greerwatson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
greerwatson) wrote2020-07-13 02:40 am
greerwatson) wrote2020-07-13 02:40 am
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Sunshine Challenge 2020 - Prompt 4 (Green) - Take 2
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.
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Well, as you're a mod for the Sunshine Challenge, I guess you know how the spectrum is being sliced. Giving you fair warning....
I'm planning on making at least two posts next time: one for "turquoise" and one for "blue". As for indigo (which to me is only a shade between blue and purple): I'll have a few words to say when it gets its turn.
You know, if Newton really did mean "blue" to mean a lighter colour closer to turquoise than blue, and then dragged in "indigo" because he needed a word for the darker colour, then his use of colour terms was closer to Russian or Japanese than modern English. At any rate, I've had a run-in or two with those who don't consider "turquoise" to be a basic colour. (Tune in next time for the thrilling details.)
Like Newton, I've sometimes felt compelled to drag in a few novel colour terms in order to label distinctions. For instance, I'll often use "gold" to refer to the golden-orange shades in the last diagram; and "chartreuse" to refer to the golden-greens. However, I'm reasonably certain that other people who use the latter term don't necessarily apply it to the same shade of green. (Oh, just wait till we get to "violet"!)
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"Blue" is a broad term that I think most people will consider contains everything from turquoise to indigo. When you define the rainbow with the traditional 7-label split then you end up calling turquoise "blue" but, personally, when I hear "blue" I'm picturing something closer to indigo. So it's all very muddled in my head. I'll blame Newton, I guess. (I lean more towards indigo dye being the color of indigo, but… indigo flowers edge into purple.)
My biggest pet peeve is when people mix up chartreuse and puce. (If you do a google image search for "puce", there are inevitably a handful of chartreuse things mixed in because so many people mix up the names despite the colors being nothing alike.)
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Same here.
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It's been a long while since I've read Berlin & Kay; but, as I recall they asked native speakers to segment a colour array using their language's basic colour terms. Thus a broad range of hues identifiable with that term could be identified. Subjects were also asked to point out the foci for each basic colour. Berlin and Kay found that, cross-linguistically, the foci for colours like red, yellow, green, etc. were fairly consistent, though the range of colours so identified varied enormously. Essentially, the more colour terms your language has, the more tightly you draw the boundaries; but you'll always put the central colour (e.g. the ideal red, the perfect example of blue, etc.) in much the same place.
My recollection is that, when plotting English colour terms, they wound up with a a big gap where true turquoise shades would be. Then again, they didn't consider "turquoise" a basic colour term; so their subjects would not have been allowed to identify colour chips as turquoise.
Without having the book in front of me, I can't tell you what their test subjects picked as focal blue. And, as I recall, they told readers up front that the printing process made the picture of the colour array inaccurate anyway; so that doesn't help much!
When we do the next colour, I'll be sure to do my best to show focal blue and turquoise for me. But it'll be by what I see on my monitor; so there's no saying how you'll see it. :(
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Hrmph. Poor planning on their part. I'd probably call it "cyan" instead of turquoise because when I think of colors, I'm more likely to think of paint or ink. I tend to think of "turquoise" mainly as the stone.
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Well, to me, those terms mean something along these lines:
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:-)
Interestingly, if you google "chartreuse" you won't see examples of puce. The error only seems to work the other way around. (I'm vaguely curious about what the alcohol chartreuse tastes like, but not enough to go out and actually buy some.)