1200: Basic Color Categories (Color Week: 1) Mar 23, 2018
This is the first post of Color Week to celebrate the 1,200th post! Thank you for your support and please share.
The term "basic color category" is used to denote a word that acts as an umbrella term for a specific group of colors, such as 'red', 'yellow' and 'green', which encompass many different shades and hues. It is rare that a language would have more than about a dozen of these—English has 11 and Russian has 12 (which will be discussed during this week)—but some languages only have 2 or 3. With those languages with only a few basic color categories, the categories will almost always fall into 'light', 'dark' and then next will be 'red'. In fact, there is a noticeable trend to the order in which a language will gain each category with 'red' being the first and 'blue' usually being the last. An early explanation of this was that people could not see the color blue as thoroughly without a word for it, and peoples such as even the Ancient Greeks would only be detecting greens and other similar colors beforehand. If this were true, it would support the idea that language has an effect on the relationship between neurology and physiology. However, recently people have also noted that blues are less common in nature, and do not act as natural warnings in the same way that plants and animals flaunt reds as meaning 'dangerous', so there would have been less of a need for this practically, but not a lack in the actual vision. Both of these ideas will be challenged and supported on the blog over the next 6 days.
Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts
The term "basic color category" is used to denote a word that acts as an umbrella term for a specific group of colors, such as 'red', 'yellow' and 'green', which encompass many different shades and hues. It is rare that a language would have more than about a dozen of these—English has 11 and Russian has 12 (which will be discussed during this week)—but some languages only have 2 or 3. With those languages with only a few basic color categories, the categories will almost always fall into 'light', 'dark' and then next will be 'red'. In fact, there is a noticeable trend to the order in which a language will gain each category with 'red' being the first and 'blue' usually being the last. An early explanation of this was that people could not see the color blue as thoroughly without a word for it, and peoples such as even the Ancient Greeks would only be detecting greens and other similar colors beforehand. If this were true, it would support the idea that language has an effect on the relationship between neurology and physiology. However, recently people have also noted that blues are less common in nature, and do not act as natural warnings in the same way that plants and animals flaunt reds as meaning 'dangerous', so there would have been less of a need for this practically, but not a lack in the actual vision. Both of these ideas will be challenged and supported on the blog over the next 6 days.
Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts