COLOUR WORDS: The astounding origins of "blue", "black", "orange", "red" & other colors 

I can't believe I forgot to mention "swarthy"! I absolutely meant to.

@@RobWords I thought the colour beginning with a was going to be amber ...

In Dutch black is zwart

@@marcvanpoucke5560 German shwarc. Edit: schwarz

How does anyone knows how extinct languages were spoken?

Wisdom of infants………you must be an sjw.

interesting. in my area, the night sky has a greenish shade

Brilliant

Thanks for sharing this little reminder of how literal experience and iconic tropes can differ in contextual practice.

In primary school, I painted a picture of a stormy sky we'd seen on a Sunday drive. Deep blue clouds, with dark golden orange sky below them. Teacher rubbished it! Quite put me off painting for a long time. 😞

Yes Colin, that wa my immediate reaction too, the flowers being named after their pinked edges, not their colour, which can be varied.

interesting addition, thanks

It's also a term in fencing. To be "pinked" is to be stabbed lightly with a pointed weapon aka "pricked."

Probably a mild manifestation of misogyny (since pink is always associated with females) but yeah, I, too, would have wanted to hear more idioms like "in the pink of health" or something. I just discovered this channel by the way. I hope the host is a progressive person. 😕🤞🏼

@@reichen666 Pink was originally associated with boys, as a junior version of the male colour red - think traditional red army uniforms. Blue was originally associated with women and girls, traditionally the colour of the Virgin Mary. The switch to blue for boys and pink for girls is quite recent, mid 20th century.

I'm from Russia myself, and I was greatly surprised in elementary school, when we were learning English, that English-speaking people refer to a pair of related but different colors "синий [ˈsʲinʲɪɪɪ̯] " and "голубой [ɡəɫʊˈboɪ̯]" as "blue" and "light blue". And there is another word in Russian for blue [ɡəɫʊˈboɪ̯] - лазуревый/лазоревый [ɫɐˈzurʲɪvɨɪ̯] / [ɫɐˈzorʲɪvɨj] and it can be translated closer into English as "cerulean", "azure" and it sounds literally like the Italian azzurro. And also in Russian LGBTQIA+ representatives are called by the same color - голубой [ɡəɫʊˈboɪ̯], sort of like "he is голубой (light blue)"

Interesting - in polish we use 'błękitny' for sky blue and "niebieski" for all others, but it doesn't really make sense bcoz niebieski comes from "niebo" - word for sky or heaven.

​@kacpersuski4459 I'm pretty sure 'niebo' is referring to the night sky and heaven because some ancient cultures referred the Lapis Lazuli (blue stone) to represent the heavens because of its hue, with streaks of white calcite resembling clouds, and specks of pyrite looking like stars.

@@kacpersuski4459there’s also “granatowy” for dark blue.

Interestingly enough, the Baltic languages lost that distinction again, even though they are very closely related to Slavic languages such as Russian. In Lithuanian, голубой is žalsvai mėlyna, meaning greenish blue, teal, while Latvian uses ciāns, from cyan; and are considered shades of blue.

Interesting 🤔

Interesting 🤔

That patina can be more greenish or blue. Since it is called "Grünspan" in German, I had to google it to realise that it is occasionally rather blue. The word always made me think of it as green only.

Interesting 🤔

I think this comment is one where people get a big 'oohhh! for real?! 🤯' moment from it Especially when they think about bronze skies and think 'what are the ancients meaning by this? 🤔'

ah, caeruleus must be where cerulean comes from. very neat

@@fructiferous Yep, spot on

Is livio where we get Livid from? An intense color or feeling?

What about the Russians? They have a distinction between blue, and light blue, and they are separate colors, I think...I mean that they do not think of them as blue and light blue.

@@roringusanda2837 Sure is

I loved that episode of Technology Connections! It's lowkey one of my favorites of his (and he's got a lot of bangers). An excellent channel, all around.

If brown is dark orange, then orange is light brown. But orange is not light brown in the same way that pink is light red. In the first case, you are increasing the saturation of the orange/brown hue. In the second case, you are mixing a fully saturated red hue with white, which washes it out to pink. This is explained by the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness color model. Lightened brown is actually a beige or almond color. Pink is lightened red, whereas magenta (sometimes referred to as hot pink in American English) is a fully saturated hue between red and green in the color wheel (purple is a less saturated magenta). The color of the sky is frequently a shade of cyan, which is the hue between blue and green. It is sometimes referred to as sky blue. I am not certain, but I believe that azzurro may be a hue between blue and cyan. The sky is sometimes this hue. The terms dark and light are also incorrectly used for more and less saturation, which confuses people.

Brown is probably more common in nature than orange. So it would be more like orange is light brown, maybe with a little bit of red or yellow.

​@@justinnamuco9096 yes, also brown bear.

Literally everyone who works with additive color mixing, (which is very important because it's how color pixels work and thus determines how colors appear on a screen), calls the equal mixture of light from a combination of Red and Blue pixels but not green "Magenta". (Red & Green produce "Yellow" & Green & Blue produce "Cyan".) "Magenta" is also the 'M' in CYMK printing which uses translucent color ink over a white background to produce colors that are actually bright. The Cyan, Yellow, & Magenta inks allow more light to reflect off the white background than Red, Green, & Blue ink would. This is because Cyan ink allows BOTH blue & green light through while only blocking red, with the Yellow only blocking blue, & the Magenta only blocking Green. (The 'K' is for "blacK" ink which produces the grayscale background image, and it is 'K' instead of 'B' because 'B' was already used for "Blue".) In subtractive color mixing, Blue paint absorbs both Red & Green and reflects only Blue, while Red blocks both Green & Blue and reflects only Red. So if you mix bright but opaque Red & Blue paint in equal parts then the mixture absorbs all of the green while reflecting half of the Blue & Half of the red, which produces a darker "Purple". Since the human eye is more sensitive to blue light than red light, and since subtractive opaque "Purple" pigment can never be more than half as color saturated as red & blue pigment, while additive transparent "Magenta" ink can be up to twice as brightly saturated as red & blue inks, the resulting colors are perceived as different by the eye despite actually being the same mixture at different intensity. "Purple"/"Magenta" is also the only color range that that humans can see which only exists as mixture of other colors. The actual color receptors in the human eye can only see the spectrum from Red to Green to Blue (and the 4th receptor type some females rarely have is a slightly different green.) Purple/Magenta doesn't actually exist as a wavelength of light but is essentially an optical illusion caused by way our brains process visual information, like the biological equivalent of an integer overflow in a computer Humans that have had cataract surgery can sometimes see past blue spectra to normally invisible Ultra-Violet light, and it just looks blue. (In fact UV light appearing as blue makes everything that reflects UV look MORE blue, like the world has a blue filter distorting the colors.)

What is the etymology of the word etymology?

*looks at curved pinkies* Huh.

Alas, the relationship is uncertain, according to the OED. Decorative pinking was originally puncturing and pricking holes, and the later sense of zig-zag cuts might be from (or at least influenced by) the flower petal shape, but the "obvious" connection to pinking shears isn't the etymology for the flower.

But is that really "why the flower was named pink in the first place"? Did pink originally mean something like "jagged" and that's how the flower got its name? Or are those types of scissors just called that because they make shapes like the flower?

I had heard that it comes from the Dutch word for little, as the pink flower is so named as it is little.The little finger is referred to as a pinkie.

Thank you! I've wondered about that.

A lot of slavic languages have a word that usually mean "light" as in the noun that sounds like "svet"

Hindi "bhūrā" meaning brown is also a cognate with brown

@@bletwort2920what does Bhura mean

Nice to know that! In Portuguese Rosa is the flower Rose, and we call rosa a faint red, not the vivid red, just like you do! And pink is the vivid bright red that is used on text highlighters or barbie toys

Actually, barbie toys is not really called pink in color, because they are not that vivid, but a intense rosa color...

Thanks! I wanted to mention exactly that. When I speak English I would never call something that is 'rosa' pink, I would always call it light pink.

Similarly for purple, which is split in German between light-medium shades (lila) and darker intense purples (violet). Against that, many things that English speakers would describe as orange are yellow in German, the most common in everyday life being gelbe Limonade. As a Brit, German colours are generally just a bit weird...

In Croatian we use "roza" the same way German uses it and "ružičasta" being the brighter more vibrant shades of pink. When it comes to blue we do make a distinction similar to Italian, but "plava" meaning blue is lighter and "modro" is a darker blue (I don't think English has a translation for this word). Also a bruise in Croatian is called a "modrica".

YES PUN Are EVEN BETTER Than RAINBOW'Z🌈!!

colour!

HYPE📌🚩💥🍾🍵

I don't know if it's ignorance or visual deficiency. Pink is not a shade of red. Pink contains blue so it's in the family of lilac, purple and violet. Indeed, after he shows a pink that's actually pink but insists that's not another color but it is a completely different color but being light red but a mix of red and blue. Maybe light lilac. Obviously he has some problem.

Also proto Indo European is no, was not a real language so stop citing it.

The White Cliffs which are seen from the sea made England " Alba " . before the Angles arrived

Thank you for writing this. I was unsure if I really remembered that tidbit, or if it was a false memory (I was thinking of corroded copper).

I'd agree with you there, except that copper (bronze) verdigris looks more green than blue. I've seen the sky go that colour before, but in general, on a hot sunny day such as they had extensively in ancient Greece, it isn't.

Oh hey! I've just watched Why The Ancient Greeks Couldn't See Blue by AsapSCIENCE and you need to go see this video, it explains everything! :D

@@Fledhyris Metatron just did a video debunking the “Ancient Greeks couldn’t see blue” theory, definitely worth watching!

Fak! Could see blue? Couldn't see blue. There are only 2 colors in Greece, blue and white! Insanity!

Thanks for this! I had a proper "wow" moment with the link between lapis lazuli and azul etc.

Amazing that the world "azzuro", or "lacivert", would be used to mean two totally different shades of blue in Italian and Turkish! Well, "black" and "blanc" in English and French also have the same root, but mean the opposite. So it seems to happen. But still, interesting to learn about these things! You learn as long as you live, and you live as long as you learn.

One question : Why has the Turkish language two words for red, "kırmızı" and "kızıl"?

I wonder about violet in relation to purple

Interesting! In Spanish “azul” (from lapis lazuli) is the general word for blue. Unlike Italian, there is no word similar to blue, so I wonder about the etimology of Italian “blu”. There are other words for specific hues of blue: “ciano”, “turquesa”, “añil”, “marino”, “glauco”, “zarco”, “ceruleo”, “celeste”… although “glauco”, like the eyes of Athena, can actually be blue, green, grey or simply shinny 😅 better not to look Athena in the eye…

I shall cut this comment out (with my pinking shears) and stick it on my wall.

It is interesting that baby boys wear pink originally in German places till Prussia military starts a sea military ships campaign where the military seamen wear a white blue uniform. So boys wear them in small size and baby boys wear blue and baby girls wear pink ... 🤯

@@RobWords there’s a comment above the explains link in even more detail, check it out

@@RobWords I always wondered why and how pinking shears got their name. Now I know.

@@RobWords pink deserves its own video, there's so much to say about it!

thats too funny pmsl

Stick it where the sun don’t shine!😂

Fire-yellow is a great name for orange 🤟

@@4namolly Or maybe flame-red. In any case, much more descriptive and poetic than ... "orange" 🔥

In German, we not only use rosa, but we differentiate between rosa and pink, where rosa is a lighter and much less bright shed than pink. Saying that, the question comes to my mind, why we even developed the different names for the different kinds of red in the end as language develops from culture and experiences of the people speaking it.

I remember from high school in the late 2000s that I was so into Svenska. I remember my favourites for learning Swedish was a foreign language dictionary I picked up & SlayRadio's 'Mastering Swedish' of which there were 5 parts I believe. One sentence out of many that were being incrementally taught to a Brit - I'm Canadian instead, was 'Skiva Skära Skinkan Skevt'. It was translated as 'Cut the pink ham unevenly'. And so incidentally I might have actually learned pink in its more original form & I do wonder... would I perhaps confuse any Swedes younger than myself by using it? :)

@@martinfiedler4317 What about copper-based woods on extra-terrestrial planets - making the hue much greener, hrmmm? :) Sorry I love thinking & being confrontational with it for the sake of fun & learning equally. I do like the basis for the term, but I know how I'd alter it depending on the other Germanic Languages. But it'd largely keep the same basic & inherently understandable background. It's either Flame-Colour or probably even Fire-Tip for me.

In yorta yorta word for red is blood blood (I can't remember the actual word) and green is grass-grass)

It seems the Maori language did not have a word for "blue" until colonisation. The word for "blue", "puru", is a borrowing from English. Around the time the British signed a treaty with Maori and settled, Gladstone, the British Prime Minister and a scholar of Ancient Greek was in the academic discussion of whether the Ancient Greeks had a word for "blue", and my understanding is that some of the more "bookish" settlers related this to Maori description of "blue" and stated that Maori had been using Maori words for "green" ("kākāriki", "karera", and the like) to describe blue as well as green, not dissimilar to the way the Greeks used red for red, and for blue.

Also interesting (to me at least) is that pink is reddish white. Māwhero. Mā = white, whero = red.

@@birzky so is kahurangi (sky cloak) a modern invention? It seems to have an older meaning, of "precious", hence kahurangi applied to the very best pounamu (which are green), but it's hard to credit that sky-cloak isn't related to the colour of the sky in some way.

@@birzky the colour aoi in japanese also used to include light greens along with almost all blue shades. Hence why traffic signals are light blue over there today after being described as aoi. The colour we learn as green in japanese lessons, midori, was apparently originally for dark green leaves only. And to complete the color dance, several shades of what i consider dark blue are bundled with purple as murasaki. Counting suffixes and colour bands were by far the most confusing culture shocks in those lessons hahaha

The question I have is why do you think that is? I’m still under the impression that the further back in human genealogy we go the more color blind people would be more common.

@@tribequest9 Color blindness wouldn’t be my guess at all. First off, genetic mistakes that cause colorblindness and other problems, increase as human generations progress through history. There would’ve been much less mistakes the farther back in history you go unless you look at some isolated situations where a family tree goes straight up due to siblings marrying. Controlling genetic problems (though our ancestors wouldn’t have described it quite that way) was a major function of having various clans and rules about who you could and couldn’t marry. Secondly; As mentioned many times in this video, often color words described shine and other features of things. Likely, our ancestors in my tribe did the same and had just one word to account for all things that were both blue and green.

There's a comment further down about people in Kazakhstan using blue and green interchangeably. So perhaps it is a function of the ancientness of a language? If blue wasn't introduced until "recently" it makes sense that some old languages might reflect the lack of "blue". Fascinating.

Welsh also has this. Although the modern words for blue and green are glas and gwyrdd, glas can mean blue/green and is often applied to grass instead of gwyrdd. In fact, one of the words for grass is glaswellt.

Interesting, as is the reply about Welsh. There is a shade between blue and green that either I see as green and others see as blue (or maybe vice versa), so they don't seem to be that far apart, despite being completely different in the web red-green-blue color scheme to the point of green contributing a lot to lightness and blue contributing very little to lightness. Glad to learn you are actively working on your language and keeping it a living one by speaking it and adding to it.

Fellow yank here, and I've always spelled it 'grey', and never had a teacher try to correct that spelling. I think it's perfectly acceptable.

This might just be a personal quirk of mine, but I tend to think of warmer/lighter shades as 'grey' with an E, and cooler/darker shades as 'gray' with an A.

Came here to see if others agreed. I’ve never heard it called “American standard” spelling. I always thought it was arbitrary and another quirk of English.

As a French-speaker, I discovered the American spelling through ACW wargames. I first thought it a spelling mistake when I read "Gray and Blue".

maybe a year ago I came across that topic and most or even all English tutors agreed that both writings are totally fine, no matter if you´re from the US or elsewhere.

“Sini” specifically refers to the kind of blue you see in patterned Chinese porcelain (whereas in English it’s the porcelain itself that’s called “china”).

English has blue and then dark blue, navy. But light blue. In most african tribes they do this with green, so they have different colours for shades of green, and they see them as different as an English speaking person would see pink and red. But to an english speaking person they are all just "green". There is no dark green or light green.

@@geroutathat The difference is that navy, like azure, is considered a shade of blue, rather than a separate colour. Pink is a much better example, because you can talk about “dark pink” and it isn’t the same as red.

@@ragnkja of course pink is the easiest example, but a lot of people would treat navy like a different colour and not a shade. For example what's the name for dark shade of green or light green. We have words for neither that I know of. But if I was to say to someone in work "oh you're wearing a blue suit", they would look at it then look at me like I was crazy and say "it's navy" so for a lot of people the difference between blue and navy is same as pink and red. It's even defined as a colour between blue and black not a shade of blue. Im not saying navy is a better example. Merely the English language has a different colour in the blue spectrum for at least some people. For me, navy is a different colour, probably simply due to how I learned it. some people probably learn navy as "just dark blue", and no one would learn pink as "just light red".. baby blue is a shade for me. I'd never say "light baby blue" or "dark baby blue" cause it's just light blue. I would say "it's a dark navy"

@@geroutathat But can you say “light navy”, or is it just as much of an oxymoron as “dark baby blue”?

There is a blurring between blue and green, particularly in countries close to the equator, that has been attributed to the effects of UV light - it damages the eyes and causes everything to have a yellow cast, particularly affecting the perception of blue/green. I wonder if that is behind the confusion between ao and midori

@@annelyle5474 Interesting. Could just be that blue is uncommon and they are very similar colors, so they just let context differentiate too. Because Japan isn't equatorial.

@@annelyle5474 Also there are some people who have trouble seeing the difference between say ( blue )turquoise and a light green ( there is turquoise stone which has more yellow so it's green ).

Might be more to do with that particular word in that part of the world. In Old Chinese, 青 (qing) used to refer to a blue dye made out of a blue flower while 绿 (lü)referred to green. In modern Chinese, qing now refers to green, lü still refers to green, and the name of the blue flower now refers to blue. I'm not super familiar with Japanese so could be wrong here but I do believe the qing character correlates to the Japanese ao.

I’ve heard that in some Asian languages the distinction between blue and green arose from the division of natural vs man made. So, one word encompasses natural green and blue while two other words each describe man made blue and man made green

Inderdaad, Nederlands is minder veranderd dan Engels.

interesting. Here some Greek ones : Ροζ (Roz) -pink Κόκκινο (ko-kee-no) -red χρυσό (chree-so) -gold κίτρινο (kee-tree-no) -yellow ελία (eh-lee-ja) -olive Τυρκουάζ (tier-quaz) -turquoise πράσινο (pra-see-no) -green μωβ (mov) -purple βιολέτ (vee-o-let) -violet

I had to google these to make sure I was imagining them right Wisteria colour is really really nice, I love it We need a word like that in English

Thanks. I'm trying to learn Japanese at the moment. This is helpful.

@@jodypalm303 Good luck with the Japanese, but just a warning that these colour names are not helpful because most Japanese don't even know them. These are traditional names, rarely used today.

@@alukuhito oh... 😞 So what is mostly used now? Did the words simply evolve into something less poetic, or are there now words instead that came in from other languages?

yellow sounds like the Ukrainian word for flowers квіти (kvity)

@@matchaeylle Ukraine’s national flower is a sunflower so this makes a lot of sense!!

@@Mackusmwahaha yeah but that word is Соняшник (sonyashnyk)

Can we trace the similarities to a common PIE root, I wonder?

@@yuyiya Yes, although it is still hypothetical. (I forgot "bling", dazzling jewelry.)

Fascinating observation! Gonna go look in my American Heritage Dictionary now to see if anything’s on that. They have the deepest etymologies and it was the textbook for my Indo-European studies class.

Blister

@@TheDivayenta Blister is in another group of bl- words i noticed with related meanings of "swell up"/"something that swells up", " forcefully expel air"/"noise with expulsion of air", including blab, bladder, blare, blast, bleat, blimp, blister, bloat, bloom, blossom, blow, blurt, bluster.

The word 'naranja' is a relatively new addition to Spanish. It came to Europe in the medieval era, via Persian traders. The word was originally for the fruit, then it began to be used for the colour. The words for mother/madre/matru/mata are far more fundamental. They all came from PIE, the ancestor of both Latin and Indic languages.

Naranja even sounds similar to orange

​@@shawnferguson5681Orange comes from Naranja

Some words like Patra are very ancient, probably from 10 000 years ago, in Finnish, an otherwise completely different language, pappa means grandfather. Some words are so often used they barely change

That's the Indoeuropean language family for you

In Japan the color Aoi 青い is used to describe leaves and traffic lights which are mostly green but also the blue crayons. They also use 'buru-' ブルー for blue instead of Aoi. Interestingly modern Japan uses "orenji" オレンジ in favor of "daidaiiro" 橙色 which describes the color of an orange fruit. Japan has a tendency to favor loan words even for colors over native color words to such an extent it's almost comical.

How are those pronounced?

@@FrogeniusW.G. ​ 青: qing 藍: lan

@@thienkimnguyen1260 Thank you! :) I guess my eyes are qing. A dark blue-green-grey tone. 😄

@@FrogeniusW.G. my impression of “qing” is something bright and/ or lush so i don’t think dark shades could be called “qing”, but it’s just my two cents tho because i’m not a native speaker :”>

Or it could literally refer the absence of colour, whether that’s because it’s too dark to perceive the colour or because it’s too bright. That’s certainly consistent with the meaning of “blank”.

@@ragnkja white-hot

I thought the same, sometimes ashes are white

blank in German means shiny/ light / clean from Germanic *blanka - white. bleak comes from Old Norse and bleach from Old English my etymological dictionary tells me - with the connection to modern black. Nothing about it being borrowed from French.

@@popsicle3649 I know what "blank" means in German. I was rather referring to Rob's discussion of the French take on burned, which resulted in "blanc = white". Starts at 2:00. At about 2:29 the discussion is why one might interprete burned as "white". Rob refers to the flame. I on the other hand thought that whenever I see wood after it has burned, it is covered by the ashes, unless wind has carried it away. And these ashes are usually rather white.

Fascinating ❤️

Spain (at least my nearest city) has a lot of semaphores with those bluish green lamps and I always thought it was something related to colorblind people, maybe those are just lamps made in Japan.

Maybe color blindness played into this too

A lot of traffic lights in different places do not have a strong green color for green. The US is very green, but it's more of a blue-green in many other countries. If you get up close to the light and the glass (or plastic) that it is made from, it's often surprisingly blue. It could be related to colorblindness but I don't think so, since for whatever reason that is less of an issue with bright objects.

thank you. i didn’t know that. so, to this day, they only have 4 colors? and they SEE only 4 colors. it is hard to imagine…

Why is everybody giving credit to poetic language?

@@Faustobellissimo Because - with a little chemistry - we can understand that bronze really was blue-green before modern chemistry. So it WASN'T just poetic. It was undoubtedly the name of the color in everyday speech. But most of the information we get about language comes from writing - and very often poems and such are our most frequent source.

@@SteveBakerIsHere I saw a similar comment/explanation further up the thread, and disagreed - because your typical ancient Greek sky looks nothing like the colour of verdigris (discoloured bronze). Then I discovered this video Why The Ancient Greeks Couldn't See Blue by AsapSCIENCE which explains what was actually going on! Nothing to do with verdigris, it probably WAS a reference to dark, gleaming bronze - because they didn't have a word or concept for blue, and had to extrapolate to other things, and bizarrely, they would have thought of blue as being closer to black - but maybe a shiny, deep brown-black like bronze which needs polishing, but hasn't fully oxidised. It sounds weird to think of bright blue sky as bronze, it sounded weird to me too until I watched the AsapSCIENCE video, which explains how language changes neurological perception of colours. It's fascinating, and follows on so neatly from this video, give it a watch!

@@Fledhyris The color match isn't exact between verdigris and the sky - but it doesn't have to be. In a civilization where there aren't too many blue things to be found - the blue/green color of verdigris is likely to be closer to the color of the sky than any other common substance in the ancient Greek's vocabulary. We make the same error by saying that the sky is blue...it's not remotely blue - it's cyan - a color composed of about 50% green 50% blue. But uncorroded bronze is very definitely BROWN and the sky is about as different from brown as any color you can imagine! I"m very well aware of the neurological thing - but it's not the simplest explanation. I have to disagree with the AsapScience video...the phenomenon they describe does happen - but it's not remotely strong enough to make brown look like cyan.

@@Faustobellissimo there was no wikipedia in ancient greece and we should rely on the available sources: poems, drama, epics.

That explains why the city of Aomori (meaning "blue forest") is called that way.

Same in german just that we add hell "light" or dunkel "dark". So Hellblau and Dunkelblau. Except for pink, we call that rosa

We have an example like this here in Brazil, but not so consistent as a rule, light blue is said as "azul bebê", which would mean "baby blue". But I suppose it's origin should have something to do with contemporary marketing than anything else :v

Hello from Alba!!!!!! :D

The Alps too. I do believe that the Slavs word "bel*" is related. It is possible that Alp or Alb came from the Slavic word.

In French, an inexperienced newcomer is called "un bleu" ;-), mostly in Universities

If they use Blue for fruit, then that last makes sense. Someone who is Green is "unseasoned", or not ready, like green wood, or underripe fruit.

In Scottish Gaelic, we describe vegetation as 'blue' ('gorm'), instead of 'green' ('uaine'). 😎 Also interesting to note that in English, black cattle are called 'blue', and brown cattle are called 'red'.

No dessert until you finish your blues :)

Vietnamese has the same word for blue and green, xanh. As I understand it, you know which it should be from either context, or additional words/syllables that modify it.

that reminds me of the word 'glas' in Welsh, which is also used for blue and green.

a yi a yi ay. little butterfly. green black and blue like the colours of the sky :D 青空 Aozora - Blue Skies is very nearly azura too :0

@@fthurman Indeed! And the other word in Welsh that is often used for the color green in translations (gwyrdd) really means "unripe".

Do I vaguely remember that the Japanese word for green midori is much older than blue, aoi? Can anyone else confirm?

@@JWRogersPS In Scottish Gaelic, we describe vegetation as 'blue' ('gorm'), instead of 'green' ('uaine'). 😎 And 'glas' means 'grey'!!!!!

What do swedes call the little orange Look a likes then germans call them Apfelsinne what has the same root then your apelsin an big apelsin ( an actual orange in british ) is caled orange in german but the e isnt silent but when refering to the color orange the e is silent .

@@achnurso8870 That one is called klementin.

More on the Orange: in many Mediterranean languages, like Greek and Arabic, they call it "Portulaki" (approximately), meaning "Portugal fruit". And in Greek at least, the word to describe the color orange is also Portukali (πορτοκάλι).

@@johanrunfeldt7174 Well in Germany klementines are spelled Clementinen And are even smaler than a Apfelsine weird No Word for oranges than in swedish odd but interesting

@@johanrunfeldt7174 but in german we say Klementine to an orange hybrid forgot what the orange is paired with Butt the result tastes the same and is smaler than an apfelsine

Japan 🇯🇵: 🫣

I think Japan does that too on their flag.

@@justayoutuber1906 I thought the rising sun was red on the flag because the sun does appear red at sunrise and sunset. But you're right -- it might be that, like Koreans, they perceive the sun as red.

@@thesisypheanjournal1271 Yep. In weather reports they also use a red pictograph of the sun as opposed to yellow. In reality, the sun itself is closer to white. The only time you can actually look at it is near sunrise and sunset when the atmosphere gives it a more reddish hue. Of course if you analyze the actual spectrum of colors, apparently it's closer to green on our spectrum than any other color... whereas if you look at it from space, it registers closer to purple (likely due to the increased UV-B and UV-C which our amazingly designed atmosphere conveniently safely bounces away from us.

Are bluebirds rare in the UK? Or non-existant?

@@bigscarysteve I don't know for England, but here in Germany there are atleast partly blue birds. Some ducks have blue feathers aswell as the "kingfisher".

@@bigscarysteve Here in the UK, we have kingfishers, which have a good bit of blue on them. You'll also see flashes of blue on jays. There aren't any completely blue birds as far as I can tell. That's if you ignore imported ones: for example, budgerigars, which only get to be blue through breeding in any case.

Not only but also.....purple does not exist in the visible electromagnetic spectrum.

Yes speedwells were my first thought. Bluebells lean toward purple arguably.

The same shift is seen in many Norwegian words, although not in our word for yellow, which is “gul”.

It's also in some german dialects, so "gelb" would be pronounced like "jelb"

Ah-ha! And this is where we get American yards being the same as British gardens. It never occurred to me that the -ard- is the same in both words. 🤦🏻‍♀️ It's funny how we can look at a word and not see it for its relationship or parts in another. Thank you for this Daniel!

The guard and yard bit seems less like an example ofnit happening in English than the differences between old norman and old (pairisian) french. For example, ward(en) and guad(ian). The first set comes from Norman (NR), who pronunced Ws where the old "French" (FR) pronounced an initial GUs, giving us the second set of that pair sound. Hence Guillame (FR) Wiallme (NR) -> Williamn. War from how the normab pronunced guerre (sonmore like werre), and so on. The græg to gray/grey is actually a case of updating spelling right in English. That final G in græg is pretty much pronounced as the y in grey/gray. So while the spelling changed, the sound is basically the same (the whole word itself barely changed pronunciation), and I imagine it was a similar pattern, after they figured to use Y for the semi vowel sounds, the final letters got all swapped to reflect it me thinks.

The yoch is alive and kicking in Dutch; it is the way we pronounce the letter G and the the ch combo as well. so '3elo' (yellow) is very much like the Dutch 'geel'. Yard would be gaarde like in boomgaard (literally 'tree-yard' meaning orchard, from ortgeard: (h)ortus-yard. Garden-yard. :-) Another example: en-yonder = du-ginder (archaic) / ginds / daarginds.

I heard welsh and breton were close (on this channel actually) and blue/green is "glas" as well!

Bavarians do the same. Most apparent today when it comes to playing cards. The Bavarian cards have 4 „colours“: Acorn, Heart, Grass and Bells. Grass shows a leave and the As of Grass is referred to as „ the Blue“. And there is a folk song about a blue pear tree

Your linguistic cousins the Irish picked the other side of the blue/green spectrum. Glas in Irish is green.

bilingual (and multilingual) families raise native semioticians

What is your favorite color? Orange. No Greeeeeeeeeeeeeen.

It *is* fascinating listening to kids from multi-lingual households flip like that. One of the coolest things I ever heard was once when my kids played soccer (football) there were several South African kids on their team (we have a large white South African expat community here). The kids would speak to the other kids with perfect Canadian English accents, but then turn to their parents and speak SA English. Then flip back to their Canadian accents with their friends. All in English, but 2 very different dialects!

I stayed with a family in Yvoire, the mother was German, father Irish, lived in France, the kids spoke all three languages sometimes in the same sentence , it was fascinating and bizarre at the same time.

@@mikejones-go8vz It's likely thats the Irish influence. The French hate that they are really snooty, and the germans are not fond of it, but Irish speakers do it all the time. The closest I can get as to why they flip like that, is they have two dialects of English, so if they are an Irish speaker they actually know 3 languages, and the hiberno-english dialect lets them bridge and switch without creating a pidgin language.

In fairness I steep my green tea so long it's brown anyway

When I was a kid, I always saw a mud puddle as "orange colored" but everyone kept calling them brown which puzzled me.

Also consider that traditional medicine in east Asia has usually taken the form of herbal teas that often are brownish.

It's "orange with context." Really it's basically how apparently Italians think azure isn't just bright/electric blue.

Wahey! Thanks and welcome aboard.

Was always curious about "apfelsine" and similar variants (appelsin in Danish, and апельсин in Russian). Didn't occur to me that "-sin" is China. Thank you!

Superb! Thank you

I guess the French are to blame here, who somehow found Arausio and Naranja similar enough to make it the same word.

Thinking about it, there is also a connection to the carrot. The colour of the vegetable was originally not orange. Today, you find variants of black, red, yellow, or white colour. The Dutch seem to have liked orange so much that they are said to have changed the predominant colour of the vegetable to orange by selection.

@@Eddi.M. That root has different names in German. Karotte, Möhre, Mohrrübe, Gelberübe. While Karotte comes from Latin carota and Greek karoton, Möhre seems to go back to an ancient indogermanic word meaning edible root, Rübe to something similar ... so Mohrrübe combined both of them and Gelberübe clearly comes from the yellow kind.

In modern Polish czerstwy means stale, but that wasn't always that way. About 500 years ago Polish and Czech were basically the same language.

😆

Nice! And "crust" in English is also sometimes a synecdoche for bread - or even food in general, as in "spare a crust for a homeless person". Bread (and dough) are slang for "money" of course.

What is more mind-boggling to me is that all those words - English black, German blank, French blanc, Polish biały and Czech bílý all have the same proto indo european root - bhel-

@@kriiistofel I don't find that so strange. It is much more boggling how some Polish and Czech words sound exactly the same, yet mean totally different things. Like Polish szukać - search, look for and Czech šukat - 🤣

Oh, this makes sence!

Do the Chinese call their green traffic lights "blue", as the Japanese do? Even though they know they are green? 🚦🤔

@@_Tree_of_Life_ No, it's still a green light, not a blue light. The word for green is very different from qing (green is lǜ) and blue is also very different (lán). The characters are also written very differently 绿 (green - lǜ) and 蓝 (blue - lán).

@@_Tree_of_Life_ Ah, but the Japanese also refer to many "green" things as "blue," especially in relation to plants. I couldn't back it up, but I suspect that earlier Japanese language must not have used the term for green as often, in favor of using the word for blue to cover a range from yellowish-green through blue.

Very interesting. I wonder if there is a connection between the origin and/or pronunciation of the Chinese word "qingtian" and English word "gentian", which is a flower that is commonly an intense blue colour.

I bet that pickle was green too!

i know what they mean though... "light" red to most people means a bright, clear, not muddy, red that sits toward the yellow side of the spectrum, but not enough to be called orange. a red with no blue tones.

it's interesting to me, but as a tetrachromat, I'd describe 'light red' and 'pink' as being two distinct colours. Light red is warmer shade of neutral red, where as pink is a a lighter shade of read which possess a slightly cooler, more blueish, tone.

Light red is only pink if you make it light by mixing it with white, making it a pastel. Consider tinting clear plastic with different amounts of red dye and you'll get an idea of what these folks were after. You can now buy house paint that has a clear base and doesn't pastel but it's a bit of a specialty item still

@@fthurman that is interesting. The colour you describe as light red would be orange red to me. Light red would be a very dark pink. And pink would have no bluish hue to it, otherwise I would consider it lilac.

same in russian language

And mostly the same in Bulgarian.

Same thing in Italian with the word “porpora” indicating a specific colour among the various kind of “viola”

French also has this distinction, with "violet" being the most common one, and "pourpre" describing that rich red-purple colour.

Also - why did writers decide to transpose letters, with purpel suddenly being spelled purple (English). What govered that shift?

Thanks for that interesting information!!!!! In Scottish Gaelic, we describe vegetation as 'blue' ('gorm'), instead of 'green' ('uaine'). 😎

I believe the state, Vermont, is a portmanteau of verde (verdant; green) and mountain.

Gelb, geld and gild are similar, geld being an old, German origin word for gold.

@@josephcoon5809 lots of places in the US have French roots. If you look at place names from Native American languages, you'll notice they're spelt with a French ear. I believe the vote on which language would be official, English or French, by the Founding Father's was very close.

@@michellebyrom6551 Well, ‘verdant’ is a descendant of the Latin ‘viridis’, and the Founders were fond of Latin, so I would say any French region in the area with French roots in their name would actually be rooted in Latin. I’m sure the vote reflects how much they didn’t want to create schisms while also understanding that having a common unifying language was important. The sprinklings of Latin phrases almost seems like an attempt to establish a foundation common to both English and French. Your point is taken, though.

Fun fact about Turkish "yeşil" (green): it has the same root as the words "yaş" (wet), "yaşam" (life), "yaşa-" (to live) and "ışık" (light)

I watched an interesting video about their blue-green traffic light colours because of this :)

I don't think people really ever look at the sky. When I was a child crayoning, I drew a picture with a sky, and I made it whiter around the sun. The teacher asked why, and I'm like "Because... that's the way it looks?" Teacher had never noticed the sky was different shades of blue depending on time of day, how close to the sun, etc.

It's likely because associating the sky singularly with blue is learned and not necessarily observed. The sky and the various parts of it exhibit a wide range of colors. I feel the sky is more generally white, and blue is more associated with the uncommonly nice day. If you are not heavily exposed to the trope I imagine the natural response to "what color is the sky?" is "when? where?".

As an Italian, I can confirm that the sky is referred to as "celeste" or "azzurro" ("sky blue" or "azure" in English). But these are NOT simply lighter shades of blue. By blue we mean a pure deep intense blue, while azure and sky blue are actually mixtures of blue, cerulean and cyan.

@@joelsmith3473 which brings us all back at the "cultural" reasons for the colours name: if you are born on the Highlands, would you instinctively associate "blue" to the (assumingly) cloudy sky over your head 12 months a year?

@@joelsmith3473 agreed; a friend of mine growing up where there was, relatively, not very much of that uncommonly nice day sky, usually opted for 'grey' to describe the sky.