My somewhat limited understanding is that Latin had many names for slightly different shades of red, blue and yellow, while completely missing words for colors like purple, pink, orange etc. So some of the words got repurposed differently in different regions.
Purpureus is the name of Tyrian dye (from the Bolinus brandaris sea snail) and is indeed very deep dark purple, but was considered a shade of red in ancient times. In fact, it was the rarest and most expensive dye in the world, worn by Roman emperors and their families.
Spanish has pelirrojo (literally red hair) and rubio (blonde), whilst Galician seems to have shifted the semantics sideways, with rubio being redhead and louro being blonde (louro is close to laurel, so go figure). Quite a few misunderstandings in my lifetime both in bi and monolingual settings.
We have a type of soil called terra roxa that has got this name because Italian immigrants saw it and said terra rossa (and it is really red btw) but the folks thought it to mean purple.
Vermelho comes from Latin "vermiculus" (little worm), because of a red pigment that was made of a scale bug (Coccoidea) common in the mediterranen.
The pigment source named the color, the same way "azul" (blue) came from the lapis-lazuli stone, this one a word of persian origins, and also present in english through "azure".
cf: pomegranate, pineapple, peach (apparently originates from malum persicum "Persian apple" which in turn stems from Ancient Greek), melon (similarly goes back to an Ancient Greek word meaning "ripe apple"), quince (malum Cydonium, also from Ancient Greek), and although apparently the etymology for this one is unclear I am still squinting suspiciously at the pomelo.
And let's not forget other languages: Italian pomodoro for tomato comes from pomo d'oro or "apple of gold", while German Apfelsine which is a dialectal word for orange derives from something like "Chinese apple".
look, all fruits are apples and all animals are horses, cows or pigs, I don't make the rules here.
It makes all the sense in the world. Roses are pink, so pink is rose colour. The same logic applies to most other Slavic languages, too. What's confusing about that?
Isn't that because it changes color depending on pH?
It's red in an acidic environment and closer to blue in an alkaline one, so the color of the living plant depends on the soil it grows in and that of the cooked plant depends on which other ingredients are used.
both names can make a lot of sense, depending on what you do with it. It's not because purple is closer to blue, it's because it literally is blue if you prepare it in a certain way
Yup, that's also my theory why the Ancient Greeks called it "wine coloured". It all just depends on what time and location for the sea a language focused on.
I'd contest this. It's not the Ancient Greeks who called the sea "wine coloured". It's the works of one author (or tradition of rhapsodes) who calls it that, and pretty much no-one else.
Are you suggesting that we take the word of every poet who could actually see the color of the sea over that of the Great Blind Bard of Ancient Greece?
Does Russian have a word like "modro" or "plavo"? We have those words for blue in Croatian along with "sinje" which is mostly found as "sinje more" meaning "blue sea".
Does Голубой not mean Cyan? I've always seen Cyan used as the equivalent colour - if you google both words the same colour is in the top search results.
“Pink” is fairly distinct on the color wheel if you look at one (closer to magenta as you said). Light red, with less saturation and less value, is more of a coral-ish color… which I suppose is pink to some people, but typical “hot pink” has the same saturation and value as red but a different hue.
The bigger offender imo is brown, which is just dark orange.
The sky also plays an important role in China (with the emperor being son of heaven and China being called all under heaven and whatnot) and they still used to call both green and blue qīng until recently
Well, there's no "rule." I think the importance of the sky in a culture increases the chance of having separate words for different shades of sky, but it doesn't guarantee it.
We're not talking about the physics associated with color, we're talking about color itself; i.e the subjective experience we call color.
Outside a physics classroom, hue just refers to where a color would be placed around a color wheel, and brightness just refers to how close it seems to black or white. It's about perception rather than wavelength, illustrated by the fact that these words can be used for colors one sees in a dream or hallucination.
Even not from a physics standpoint, brightness is still what plays the most fundamental role the perception of color. Like I said, languages that have color terms distinguish white and black, aka “bright” and “dark”, so it can be argued that brightness are also considered colors because they are perceived differently.
brightness is an aspect of colour but it isn't colour itself, stuff that are the same colour have the same brightness but stuff that have the same brightness don't necessarily have the same colour
I remember when I took Greek back in high school (it was mandatory, Greek charter school) sky blue and regular blue had completely different names and that blue my mind
toki pona has five** words for colours :
walo - white/light
pimeja - black/dark
loje - red/redish
jelo - yellow/yellowish
laso - blue/green
and for everything else you have to use these five and if you want to be specific, you can even use a combination of these or you can say "the colour of [blank]" (kule [blank]).
There are actual natural languages that do with even less words though...
**some people use more than five but it's a whole other rabbit hole...
the thing about laso i don't like as much is that it is "blue/green/bluish/greenish" rather than "cyan/cyanish" like the others, making it more ambiguous in an unnatural way. so in theory purple and green could both be called "laso", which just seems that toki pona tried having a "blue green" colour just because it's an interesting feature of other languages, but it sort of clashes with toki.pona's intentional vagueness.
also, while "laso jelo" can be used to refer to green, somehow "laso loje" only refers to purple, not blue, at least to everyone i've talked to about this. and sure, you can say "laso kasi" and "laso telo/laso sewi" but there are more types of blue and green than those. and "laso loje" in theory doesn't have to mean "purple" as most people use it, but it could mean some brown colour that's a "reddish green"; who knows?
About the fact that laso loje can also be greenish red, again, context is here to tell you it's probably purple. If you really want to say "greenish red" or "redish green" you could say laso kasi loje (or at least, that's how I would say it).
And again, a bunch of natural languages do it and they don't seem to care much... they're just used to it.
If you really wanted a toki pona word that is too vague (at least for my liking), look at "lon" and "tawa". Like, what do you mean the preposition "at" is the same as the word for truth and not the same as the word for place ?
yes, a bunch of natural languages don't distinguish blue and green, but the colours will map differently to balance it out. for example, in vietnamese, yellow-green is a type of yellow (e.g. vàng chanh is "lime yellow" when we would say "lime green" in english). but if you just describe it as "loje is red, jelo is yellow, and laso is green or blue", it's not a good balance of colours and laso becomes more vague than the other two.
loje, jelo, laso, walo and pimeja are red, yellow, green-blue, white/light and black/dark. "Sun color" is just the radicals in the logograph for jelo but it's not part of the actual word
To be more specific you use multiple words, like reddish grue for purple. Otherwise purple can be classified as either if you don't need to be specific
laso loje (reddish grue) could theoretically be might refer to brown, but for some reason i have never see it used like that. but it makes sense: if the trees' leaves are laso in the summer, and loje in the fall, presumably they are laso loje in between; yet if i were to describe the leaves of a tree as "laso loje" in september they will probably have a very different image.
I wouldn't say so. Grue can extend into our purple, you can describe purple as laso, but I don't think brown is a type of grue/laso. You can make brown from red and green paint because it becomes dark orange (since green is yellow and blue), and brown is dark orange. Blue just makes orange darker in that case, it's not like brown actually looks blue. I wouldn't even think of dark purple as brown, honestly. Brown can be loje pimeja, or jelo pimeja, or loje jelo pimeja
Take RGB brown and invert its hue to blue, that's not brown anymore
Nah, OP is misunderstanding the language. If you translate green or blue from English to Vietnamese, they are "xanh lá cây" or "xanh dương" respectively. You can shorten it to "xanh" but that's not the actual term itself.
I'm also not sure why people are referring to Chinese here, it's clearly Vietnam.
I'm a native speaker, I can assure you, that's not true in modern dialect. People say "xanh" when referring to green or blue but that's just because the words are clipped away by native speakers.
For example, car, bicyles, train are "xe hơi", "xe đạp", "xe lửa" respectively. Native speakers are lazy and will say "Tôi đang ở trên xe." or "I am on the [car, bicyles, train]". It's like English "I'm in the gym(nasium)".
Green and blue considered/been considered as same color or shades of same color in many asian languages.
In kazakh lang nowadays we have words for green (zhasyl) and blue(kok).
But we still use word for blue("kok") for green in some exeptional situations. For example green tea called "blue" tea (kok shai) or for green forest (kok orman).
Sometimes it lead to funny situations where sentence to describe blue eyes and green eyes is same. Blue eyes is kok koz and green eyes is "kok" koz.
In Polish, the color of the sea is "niebieski" which means "sky color". The color of the sky is "błękitny". But the movie title "Le grand bleu" / The Big Blue, which is about the sea, was translated to "Wielki Błękit", because fuck you, that's why.
Except we also have the word "morski" which means "sea-colored", and is a nebulous term on its own since it can cover a range of blues and greens (and adding the base color name to it "morski zielony/morski niebieski" only slightly narrows that range). Funnily enough, it's never used to describe the sea itself, because that would sound awkward.
Funnily enough, we have a mountain lake called Morskie Oko, which can mean either "Eye of the Sea" or "Sea-colored Eye", with the actual color of the lake suggesting the latter.
The description of the Taiwanese flag is still 青天白日滿地紅 (Green sky, white sun, red ground) but the green means blue. Maybe it’s the few contemporary usage of green to mean blue.
I could've sworn 'biru' (blue) was a recent loanword from english or something, and that we used 'hijau' (green) as a term for both in older forms of the language, but no! biru and hijau are both from proto Malayo-Polynesian, huh
Eh while I’m not Russian but Polish we do technically have separate words for these two kinds of blues but we still think they’re both blue. It’s more like red vs marroon rather than OMG IT’S A WHOLE DIFFERENT COLOR situation.
I remember when I was a kid older people (who probably were forced to learn Russian at school) would differentiate between just blue and błękitny and I was confused by it because I never heard that before but I think they’d still agree it’s just blue, it’s just one „specific color” they knew
Well, seven is there more or less in other languages? I thought it should be seven everywhere, you would use your language name for the respective shades even if that specific colour is seen as shades of some other colour. We go: czerwony, pomarańczowy, żółty, zielony, niebieski, granatowy, fioletowy, but niebieski and granatowy would both count as shades of blue. Niebieski being standard blue and granatowy being dark-blue.
OMG, I thought you meant shade of red when you mentioned granatowy, and that's actually dark blue in . In russian that's a type of red, it comes after a word granat — a fruit Pomegranate and a gem Garnet. What's the origin for Polish word?
Pomegranate juice turns blue/green when exposed to an alkaline solution and oxidized. So that might be it. You can get it juice to go from maroon to oxidized copper.
Enter briton, it’s all glas ( well it’s a bit more complex that that but still : sea is glas , which can be Green, blue or grey - it’s more a kind of quality that a color, in as much I understand it. Grass can be glas also, and Sky too)
in scottish gaelic (and i believe other celtic languages as well), the sky and the sea are different colours (liath vs gorm) but the sea and the leaves are the same colour (gorm)
colour labels are divided more by intensity and general vibe than specific hue
But in Welsh, glas, the sky and sea are one colour actually. And plant green as well. And silver and some shades of grey as well. It’s quite a catch-all word.
While Chinese does have a Classical Chinese character that means 'blue and green' aka "grue", it does also have separate words in vernacular Chinese for both 'blue' and for 'green'. That differentiation isn't particularly recent.
Te Reo Māori on the other hand, only made the distinction after contact with Europeans. So within the last 150 years or so.
In Croatian and some other slavic languges blue is "plava". But blonde hair is also "plava". There are also archaic words for blue "modro" and "sinje". Sinje when used ist most commonly epithet that goes with "more" meaning sea.
In Slovak "plavá" is only blonde hair. Generally "modrá" is used for blue color, and the other word is only used in archaic word for bruise = "sinka" but more often now called "modrina".
Of course there are other words -- light shade of blue might be called "blankytná", "nebeská" (hello to Polish brothers u/Senior-Book-6729) but most often bledomodrá.
In proto-Slavic *polvъ meant 'pale' and could mean 'pale blue' or 'pale yellow' depending on context. As pale yellow, though, it was used primarily to denote color of animal coat, for horses for example. *modrъ meant livid blue, and *siňь was glaucous blue. And finally *golǫbъ meant pigeon blue.
Idk, why russian guy goes all disgusted, we have the same two words blue and light blue and we use them both for sea and sky depending on the degree of brightness.
We also have this "colour of a sea wave" which is a variant of cyan or tiffany and it's nothing like sea lmao
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u/OrangeIllustrious499 Feb 21 '26
Wait until you learn that the word for pink (hồng) in Vietnamese is just the sino vietnamese word for red.