Roses are red, violets are blue (not violet?), I’ve never given much thought to the origins of colour names and their significance in framing how we see the world, have you? Phew, that counts as a rhyme.
The idea for this week’s offshoot presented itself to me like a chicken or egg problem: what came first, (the name of) the colour orange or the fruit orange? Given how commonly we see the colour orange around us, you’d think people named it first. But you’re often wrong (no shade; pun certainly intended).
In 1390s, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the following in his narrative poem, “Nun’s Priest’s Tale”, when describing the colour of a fox invading a barnyard:
its “color was betwixe yelow and reed.”
The orange fox could not be described succinctly by Chaucer because there simply wasn’t a word for ‘orange’ before the fruit arrived in Europe in the early 16th century from India (thank the Portuguese traders for that). At the time, Europeans would refer to them as ‘golden apples’, unable to find the words to talk about the fruit’s dazzling hue. But slowly, their troubles evaporated as the Sanskrit word for orange (naranga) migrated along with the fruit to Hungary (narancs), Spain (naranja), Italy (narancia) and French (narange). This n in the beginning was abandoned by Italian and French to leave behind in their current vocabulary arancia and orange. There’s a theory to explain this dropping of the letter n too:
It was probably from a mistaken idea that the initial “n” sound had carried over from the article, una or une.
Hence, ‘narange’ was confused with ‘an (une) orange’, and ultimately became ‘orange’. The word detectives work very hard indeed. Even armchair etymologists like me.
I found the answer but at what cost? A lot of hours tumbling down Wikipedia rabbit holes while marveling at the bizarre language of colours. Unlike the chaotic world of Among Us, in the real world, most colour names seem to have an intuitive and straightforward connection to objects in the natural world, like orange oranges or maroon marrons (marron is French for chestnut). It also goes the other way around. Blueberry (the fruit) got its name from the colour blue and blackberry (the brand) got its name from blackberry (the fruit), which got its name from black (the colour) + berry (or more accurately from the Old English word blaceberian).
But it’s not all birds and bees and fruits and seeds in hardcore colour naming circles. Dig a little deeper and you will find some fascinating origin stories that put Doctor Droom’s to shame—as they should; what was Stan Lee thinking?
Let’s cure the aftertaste of this awful origin story with a quick look at some fun colour names:
Magenta: from the Battle of Magenta, 1859 (fought in the Italian town of Magenta, duh)
Crimson: named after a Mediterranean insect used to create red dye
Chartreuse: from a liqueur made by 18th century Carthusian monks
Purple: after a shellfish called purpura, used by the Romans to create dye
Violet: from the name of a flower (known in Latin as a viola)
There are intriguing differences (and similarities) between colour words in different languages, as a Vox video revealed. For example, Russians never identify something as just ‘blue’. It’s either dark blue (siniy) or light blue (goluboy). The number of basic colour groups (and hence, the number of colour names in the vocabulary) also change for various languages but researchers at UC Berkeley found eerie commonalities too. For instance, if a language has only three basic colour words, they are always for white, black and red. There seems to be a natural hierarchy to the visible spectrum, with colours like red being more salient and prevalent than others like yellow.
Not only does culture affect the way we talk about colours, but the language can also determine the colours we perceive. And it’s a big deal for linguists as they believe the naming of colours holds the key to the black box that can explain how language and thought are related. The researchers mentioned above are on the Universalist side i.e., they believe that due to the same biology of all human beings, the development of color terms has some absolute universal constraints. On the other hand, the Relativists claim that the variability of color terminology cross-linguistically (i.e., from language to language) indicates a culture-specific phenomena.
Not surprisingly, given the certainty and faith we put into what we see ‘with our own eyes’, any suggestions that everyone sees colour differently can lead to an existential crisis or a global internet meltdown: remember the dress debate?
Before you call me crazy for going on and on about colours, let me point my finger at other obsessives like California-based illustrator and author Ingrid Sundberg, who has put in considerably more effort in initiatives like creating a colour thesaurus. There have been similar attempts to categorize all colours throughout history but perhaps none more successful than Pantone. The corporation began its colour guide in 1963 along with its much talked-about annual ritual, described by Open Culture as follows:
Pantone, along with a shadowy cabal of colorists from around the world, meet in a European city and, with the secrecy of the Vatican choosing a new pope, they select the color of the season.
If you’re curious, the colours of the year (yes, there are two—to compensate for the drabness of a horrid 2020) are Illuminating and Ultimate Gray.
I hope this has been an ultimately illuminating offshoot. Goodbye for today, readers. I must return to reading funny colour names on paint websites—or as some call it—research.