Ellen Meloy - The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone and Sky
"When a name for a color is absent from a language, it is usually blue. When a name for a color is indefinite, it is usually green. Ancient Hebrew, Welsh, Vietnamese, and, until recently, Japanese, lack a word for blue... It has been shown that the words for colors enter evolving languages in this order, nearly universally: black, white, and red, then yellow and green (in either order), with green covering blue until blue comes into itself. Once blue is acquired, it eclipses green. Once named, blue pushes green into a less definite version. Green confusion is manifest in turquoise, the is-it-blue-or-is-it-green color."
3 comments:
thats pretty interesting. Especially cuz your site is blue & green. Maybe people had crappier eyes back in the day when they were making languages
this is actually really interesting to me because my mom gets blue and green mixed up all the time, even in chinese! i thought maybe she didn't know her colors correctly, but maybe she's just, like, linguistically old.
related article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-colors-get-their-name
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