This fifth Sunshine Challenge is for the colour blue. But what is "blue"?

I'm one of those people who sees a distinct colour between green and [what I call] blue. This intermediate colour has various names: printers call it "cyan"; and a lot of computer types very imaginatively call it "blue-green". Some people use the words "teal" or "aqua"; but, to me, these are more specific terms. (I'd use teal only for darker shades, and aquamarine for lighter ones.) To me, the general term is TURQUOISE, which is also what I'd name the focal hue, i.e. the ideal, perfect shade of the colour.

TURQUOISE lies between GREEN and BLUE:

So, from my perspective, in going straight from "green" to "blue", the Sunshine Challenge is leaving a colour out.

Oops.

But opinions differ. Is TURQUOISE really a separate colour? When I was a little kid, it never occurred to me that it wasn't. I only realized that not everyone agreed when I was in the second half of Grade Four. It was the day when our teacher, Mrs Smith, decided to give us a lesson in colour terms.

Now, I'd known my colours since before I went to school. I think my first paint box had only four rectangles of pigment. These were the basic four, of course: red, yellow, green, and blue. My mother told me these were the four primary colours, and gave me several simple rules for mixing them:

• RED + YELLOW = ORANGE
• BLUE + YELLOW = GREEN
• RED + BLUE = PURPLE
• GREEN + BLUE = TURQUOISE
• RED + BLUE = PURPLE
• RED + BLUE + YELLOW = BROWN

Later, I learned that BLACK and WHITE both were and weren't colours (depending on how you looked at it, and who you were talking to), was given another couple of rules to add to the list:

• RED + WHITE = PINK
• BLACK + WHITE = GREY

I also learned some further mixing rules, such as "Never mix colours with BLACK", "You can lighten BLUE, PURPLE, TURQUOISE by mixing in WHITE"; and "You never lighten RED, GREEN, or BROWN with white, but do so by adding YELLOW".

Yes, these were obviously Little Kid Rules for puddling with paints.

However, my teacher's lesson on colours was even less sophisticated. Mrs Smith gave us the names of a few examples, and then asked us what additional names we knew for colours. After a couple of other kids had been called on, I stuck up my hand and added PINK to the list, which she approved. Then she asked if we knew any more colours and I said, "Turquoise!" But she told me firmly that turquoise was not a colour. Her exact words! "Turquoise is not a colour"!!!

I did not argue. Mrs Smith was not the sort of teacher to brook arguing. However, at the end of the day, I went home all grumbly, got out my paints, and thought about colours. I already knew that BLUE + GREEN = TURQUOISE; so now I wondered if there were any other rules that Mrs Smith hadn't mentioned—ones that my mother hadn't told me either. Two immediately came to me: PURPLE + WHITE = MAUVE and BROWN + WHITE = BEIGE. A little more thought gave me ORANGE + WHITE = PEACH.

Then my father came in, and I told him about Mrs Smith. He commiserated, agreed totally that TURQUOISE was a colour, and gave me two more rules for mixing: ORANGE + BLACK = BROWN and YELLOW + BLACK = OLIVE. I was highly sceptical, the more so since my mother had always told me never to mix colours with black. His response was simply, "Try it and see." (I did. He was right. In fact, I got a better BROWN than I ever had with my mother's rule.)

In junior high I learned about additive and subtractive primaries, though—like, I suspect, most kids whose sole introduction to colours came through paintboxes—I found the notion that RED + GREEN = YELLOW to be seriously weird. Perhaps a much younger generation raised on computer colours as well as paints finds it easier?

But that still leaves the problem of TURQUOISE. In university, I read Berlin & Kay's Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, and found that their opinion of TURQUOISE was the same as Mrs Smith's: they considered English to have only eleven basic words for colours (black, white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, grey). This had two interesting consequences.

1. When they mapped out the scope of each of their list of basic colour terms in English, they left a whole chunk of the diagram empty right where TURQUOISE shades should have been.
2. When they looked at languages such as Russian and Japanese that have twelve color terms, including two that are usually glossed as "light blue" and "dark blue", they were highly doubtful. Their reasoning seems to have been simply that no language could possibly have more color words than English. (Yikes!!)

So, let us consider the spectrum, which was divided by Isaac Newton into seven colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

How people who speak other languages feel about it I don't know. There are, however, a lot of English speakers who wonder what on earth Newton thought he was doing including "indigo" in the list. It's the name of a plant that is processed to yield a dye that stains things a dark blue-purple hue. The trouble is that no one much uses "indigo" as a colour term, and that particular blue-purple shade doesn't seem like a particularly basic colour, either.

On this point, the Wikipedia article on Indigo has a very interesting section. Apparently, Newton got a friend to divide up the spectrum that he projected from a prism onto the wall:

I desired a friend to draw with a pencil lines cross the image, or pillar of colours, where every one of the seven aforenamed colours was most full and brisk, and also where he judged the truest confines of them to be, whilst I held the paper so, that the said image might fall within a certain compass marked on it. And this I did, partly because my own eyes are not very critical in distinguishing colours, partly because another, to whom I had not communicated my thoughts about this matter, could have nothing but his eyes to determine his fancy in making those marks.

In other words, he asked his friend to cut the spectrum up into sections by marking out the transitions between the colours; and also asked him to mark the perfect, ideal example of each colour.

The Wikipedia article then cites people who suggest that Newton's "indigo" was closer to the colour that I call blue, while his "blue" was closer to the colour that I call turquoise. Which is interesting—and certainly makes more sense, at least to someone like me who sees turquoise as a distinct colour. Not as much a primary as red, yellow, green, and blue. More on a par with orange, purple, brown, and pink.

So, if Newton saw TURQUOISE (which he called "blue") and BLUE (which he called "indigo") as different colours in the spectrum, what am I to do with our fifth Sunshine Challenge? Today's colour is "blue"; but which blue? And what should I do about the sixth challenge, which will presumably be "indigo"?

Simple solution: do 'em all!

So this time round, besides this post, I'm going to do a second post specifically on TURQUOISE and a third post on BLUE. And next time, I'll talk about "indigo"!

:D