31. Why Is Blue Blue?

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 31.

Why Is Blue Blue?

How languages name colours, and why they do not see the world in quite the same way – at least in words

Imagine the sky on a clear day. You say "blue". In Czech it is "modrá". In French "bleu". In Russian, though, a single basic word may not be enough: lighter blue is usually goluboy and darker blue siniy. Do people around the world actually see different colours?

Fortunately, the simple equation "no word, no colour" does not hold. Our eyes react to light, while language decides how we group shades of colour into named categories. So the history of colour names shows where biology, culture and language meet.

Where did English get blue?

Today's English blue is historically connected with French bleu and with older Germanic forms. We find similar words in Dutch blauw or German blau. Old English used other, as well as related, words for shades of blue and grey; the modern colour boundary was not fixed.

In older Indo-European languages, the boundaries between blue, grey, green and light shades were often drawn differently. So the etymology of colours reminds us that a word is not given an exact RGB colour sample from the very beginning.

How did orange come about?

Orange is an especially clear example. English borrowed the name of the fruit along a complicated route through other languages; only after that did the word become fixed as the name of the colour too. So when we describe a sunset as orange today, we are using a colour name connected with the name of a fruit.

But not all colours were named after an object. English has basic words like red, black, white or green, and alongside them hundreds of names taken from fabrics, flowers, stones and fashionable shades: turquoise, lavender or crimson.

Does every language have eleven basic colours?

In 1969 the linguists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay described recurring patterns by which languages create basic colour names. In English we normally distinguish eleven such categories, for example red, blue, green, brown and pink. Some languages, however, have fewer categories or draw their boundaries differently.

The original theory was added to and revised in the following decades. So the conclusion is not that every language must go through one unavoidable order. More interesting is that there are recurring patterns across languages and, at the same time, remarkable variety.

Two Russian blues and an experiment with speed

In Russian, goluboy and siniy are two ordinary colour categories. In a well-known experiment published in 2007, Russian speakers told some pairs of blue shades apart faster if they crossed the boundary between these two terms. But when they were doing a distracting word task at the same time, the advantage disappeared.

This does not mean that an English speaker cannot see the difference between light and dark blue. It means that word categories can, under certain conditions, affect how quickly we decide. Language is a filter for attention, not a replacement eye.

Why can a "green" traffic light be blue somewhere?

Japanese historically used the word ao also for shades that in English we call green. Modern Japanese also has the common word midori for green, but for a traffic light ao is traditionally used. It is an example of how an old language convention can survive even when the everyday vocabulary already distinguishes two colour terms.

We could find many similar stories. But it is important not to turn them into claims that some nation "cannot see blue". We perceive colours, name them and sort them; these are three different processes.

Colour as emotion and a cultural signal

The English "feel blue" means to be sad. "Green with envy" means very jealous, and "to see red" means to get angry. These phrases are not about a physical change in the colour of the body, but about a cultural metaphor. Their origin is often complicated, and some popular explanations are not certain.

So if a student takes away one idea from this article, it should be this: colour words are not simple labels stuck on nature. They carry history, experience and the way a language divides a continuous spectrum.

An important note

Differences in colour words do not mean that people have different eyes. But they sometimes affect categorization and the speed of recognition.