According to her website, Carol Marine was showing in 7 galleries, but still not making a living on her artwork. In addition, since art school she thought paintings had to be big, and that was causing her a lot of misery. After adopting her baby son, she had no time for painting, but when her …
The Language of Color
[image_with_animation image_url=”11306″ alignment=”” animation=”None” box_shadow=”none” max_width=”100%”]” img_link=”https://drawinglics.com/photos/8771703/mille-fiori-favoriti-an-autumn-drive-over-kenosha-pass-to-buy-a-bear-an-autumn-drive-over-kenosha-pass-to-buy-a-bear.py Most of the information in this post is straight out of a podcast called Lexicon Valley, with John H. McWhorter. McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University, and Lexicon Valley is one of my favorite podcasts. I was listening to a recent post about color, in particular the language of color, and I got so excited I wanted to share it with you. I started typing as fast as I could.
Did you know that not every language has words for a variety of color like ours does? Not all languages have words like orange, purple, and blue. It’s true! What every language does have are words for black and white. Black and white are universal, in every language.
Tri-Color Wheel: Red, Black, and White. Image from a basic makeup kit for clowns, mimes, and geishas. That’s a party.
Ok, so your language only has words for black, white, and red. What if you want to talk about yellow? If that’s the case, then you’d use the word for red to talk about the yolk of an egg, because yellow is seen as a variation of red. All those colors just squish into fewer words. If I had no word for yellow, and someone said “the red egg yolk” I’d be ok with that. Black trees, white sky. It may not be very specific, but I can go there.
Native American Wheelie
Many languages don’t have words for blue. They have words for black, white, red, yellow, and green, but no blue. Absence of a word for blue is actually more common than you’d think. But while the word for blue is slow in coming, many languages have words that span both blue and green together. Blue-and-green. It’s very common. For instance, Japanese has the word “Ao” and old Welsh has the word “glas.”
Image from Mathias Svalina’s The Wine-Dark Sea
In Ancient Greece, Aristotle developed the first known theory of color. He postulated that God sent down color from the heavens as celestial rays.
According to the marvelous McWhorter, the words for colors always enter the language in a certain order:
This is a consistent order of language development. There is no language that has a word for yellow, but doesn’t have a word for red. There is no language that has a word for blue, but doesn’t have a word for yellow. There is no language that has a word for brown, but doesn’t have a word for blue. Red comes before yellow. Yellow comes before blue. Blue comes before brown. Always.
Pink pinking shears shearing pink
Pink didn’t come into our language until 1733, named after jagged edged flowers that were named after pinking shears. Purple used to be spelled and pronounced purpur, then purpul in Old English. After purpur in Old English came grey. Grey, my favorite, I am purposefully spelling with the clean and dignified British English “e” because for me the color changes with the American spelling, and I can’t stand seeing that beautiful cool color all wussy wimpy pinky putty when it’s spelled as “gray.”
WTF Color?!?
Did all that make your head hurt? Well, you’ll feel all that pain and more in Suzanne Walker’s upcoming WTF Color lecture on Nov 4th. Active League students attend free, with coupon code. $20 for the rest of you. Please let us know you’re attending so we can have a chair for you.
Enjoy!