Colours are easy, right? They're one of the first things you learn as a kid. Red, orange,
yellow, green, blue, purple, white, black, grey, brown, pink. And then when you learn
other languages, all you have to do is learn the new words for the same colours.
Except. That's not the way it works. That English colour system with its nicely defined
names? It doesn't map onto other languages.
Quick heads up: I am massively simplifying here. Check the references if you want to
know more details.
The most common difference -- or at least, the most commonly-studied difference -- is
whether blue and green are different colours, or different shades of the same colour, one
which English linguistics refer to as grue. Vietnamese, for example, uses the same basic
word or lexeme for blue and green: they can be literally translated as leaf grue or ocean
grue.
Does that seem weird? It shouldn't. That's just a simple change in where you draw a line
on the wheel of hues. The Ancient Greeks, on the other hand, classified colours not
by hue, but by lightness. So they had one lexeme -- one main word -- for dark blue,
green and brown... and one word for light blues, greens and greys.
We use one word, blue, for two very different colours. But in Russian, there are two different
words for what we'd call dark blue and light blue. And that really shouldn't seem strange
to English speakers, because that's exactly what we do with dark red, and light red -- or
as we call it, pink.
In 1969, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay released a book that claimed to track the evolution
of colour in languages. According to Berlin and Kay, languages start out with just words
for dark-cool colours and light-warm colours, then gain a word for red, then green and yellow,
then blue, brown, and the rest of what English refers to as the spectrum.
There is some debate over how accurate this is, and by some debate, I mean this is a really
controversial subject in linguistics and has been for decades. I'm skimming over the very
basics here, but there are reams of research, going into some very deep claims that I'm
not vaguely qualified to discuss. Lots of linguistics with very impressive degrees have
very strong and very different opinions on this.
Something as apparently simple as colour differences highlight just how tricky translation and
cross-cultural communication can be. And the debate goes a level deeper than that: it's
about whether the words we know, and the languages we learn, influence the way we interpret the
world, just reflect our existing interpretations. The answer is: I don't know. No-one does,
really. Not yet. The answer is probably somewhere in between, because language is complicated.
People are complicated. And sometimes, things really aren't just black and white.
I really need to write better puns.
[Translating these subtitles? Add your name here!]