Tag Archives: colours

Colour perception in various languages

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Today’s blog post will be about colour perception in different cultures and languages around the world.

The terms for colours cannot always be translated in a straightforward manner since some colours, esp. green and blue (“grue”) in some Asian languages, are often perceived differently from those in the West, and are considered separate colours in those countries whereas in English there is just one term for both shades or vice versa.

Russian

In Russian, there are two different terms for blue which are considered as separate colours and not just as shades of the same colour as in English: голубой (‘goluboy’) light blue and  синий (‘siniy’) dark blue.

Hungarian

In Hungarian, there are two separate terms for red: piros is a bright red and vörös is a dark red.

German

In German, there are two different terms for pink: Pink is the same bright saturated shade as in English, but when the colour is pale pink it is called rosa.

‘Grue’ or green and blue in various Asian languages

The origin of the perception of a green-blue (‘grue’) colour, which in English is called ‘teal’ or is seen as two separate colours (blue and green), comes from the Chinese character 青 (qīng).

The colour qīng 青 can mean either of the colours that in English are referred to as ‘green’, ‘blue’, or ‘black’, depending on the context and the nouns or fixed phrases it is used with. To give an example, qing means ‘blue’ when used with ‘sky’ 青天 (qīngtiān) or ‘eyes’青眼 (qīngyǎn) , but ‘black’ when used with ‘hair’ 青丝(qīngsī) and ‘green’ when used with the character for ‘mountain’ 青山 (qīngshān), ‘grass’青草 (qīngcǎo)  or ‘vegetables’ 青菜 (qīngcài).

Qing  , according to tradition, is the colour of things that are born and the term 青春 (qīngchūn ‘green spring’) means youth. This is connected to its meaning ‘black’ since young people in China have dark hair, or 青鬓 (qīng bìn) ‘black temple hair’, an idiom referring to young people. Qing can also refer to black clothes or fabrics and one of the main female roles in Chinese opera, 青衣 (qīngyī), refers to the fact that most actors wear black clothing.

Qing can also refer to the colour ‘blue’, which originates from the dye bluegrass which in ancient times was used to dye things in the colour of qing. The idiom 出於藍,而勝於藍青出于蓝,而胜于蓝 (qīngchūyúlán ér shèng yú lán, ‘blue comes from the indigo plant but is bluer than the plant itself’) describes how a student could come to excel their teacher.

The character 青qing originally derives from the components for 生 ‎’growth of plants‘ and 丹 ‎’cinnabar‘, which was also used for dyeing and by extension came to refer to ‘colour’ in general, so 青qing came to be known as the ‘colour of growing plants’ and green-blue, and came to describe a range of colours from light green through blue to deep black 玄青 (xuánqīng). Over time, the character for cinnabar was exchanged with the similar character for ‘moon’月.

The modern Mandarin Chinese language, however, also has the blue–green distinction with 蓝/ 藍 lán for blue and 绿 / 綠 for green. Another peculiarity of Chinese colour perception is the case of ‘red’ / , hóng and ‘pink’ 粉红, fěn hóng (lit.’powder red’), which are considered varieties of a single colour.

青 qing (Cantonese 廣東話 )

In Cantonese, qing 青 can describe the same range of colours as in Mandarin Chinese. It means ‘green’ when referring to grass, plants or the mountains, ‘blue’ when referring to the sky or stones, and ‘black’ or ‘young’ when referring to hair or fabrics. However, in Cantonese (廣東話), 青 qing meaning ‘black’ is still used in contexts where the use of  黑 would be inauspicious since it is a homophone of ‘乞’ (beggar), for example 黑衣, ‘black clothes’, would also mean ‘beggar’s clothes’.

Vietnamese

Vietnamese has taken over the green-blue colour perception from the ancient Chinese character and is read as xanh, which can mean both ‘green’ or ‘blue’ depending on the context. To specify which shade exactly you mean, you have to add some descriptive terms, so xanh da trời means ‘blue as the sky’, xanh dương or xanh nước biển means ‘blue as the ocean’ and xanh lá cây means ‘green like the leaves’. Vietnamese sometimes uses the terms xanh lam for blue and xanh lục for green, which derive from the Chinese characters 藍and 綠 respectively.

 

Japanese

Also Japanese has the colour green-blue, or ao ‎(hiragana あお, romaji ao, historical hiragana あを), which also derives from the ancient Chinese character and its connotations. So ao can mean ‘blue’, ‘green’ or ‘black’ depending on the context. In the case of Japanese, the colour connotation ‘black’ comes from the bluish-black colour of a horse’s hair. Ao is also used in particular to refer to the green of traffic lights and to the colour of plant leaves, vegetables and apples. By contrast, other ‘green’ objects will generally be referred to as being midori, e.g. clothes, cars, etc.

Lakota

Also in the native American language Lakota (‘Sioux’), one word is used for both blue and green, namely the term tȟó. However, a term for ‘green’ – tȟózi- has come into use, which is made up of the terms  tȟó meaning ‘blue-green’ and meaning ‘yellow’. In the same way,  zíša/šázi refers to the colour orange, šá on its own meaning ‘red’. The colour purple or violet is thus šátȟo/tȟóša.

 

 

Some interesting links for further reading on the topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language

http://www.theworldofchinese.com/2013/06/what-color-is-qing/

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92

Does your language also have a different colour perception from the English one? Let us know in the comments!! 🙂

Vocabulary: The colours in the Celtic languages

Today’s blog post is taking us to the British Isles and to the Celtic languages still spoken there. I am going to share the vocabulary for the colours in 4 different Celtic languages, namely the two Goidelic languages Irish Gaeilge and Scottish Gaelic Gàidhlig, and the two Brittonic languages Welsh Cymraeg and Cornish Kernewek, which is spoken in Cornwall.

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Synaesthesia and language learning

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Today’s blog post is about synaesthesia and how it can be useful for language learning. Synaesthesia is basically the condition in which people, when being confronted with a sensory stimulus, e.g. a written text or when hearing sounds, automatically and involuntarily experience a sensory stimulus in a different sensory pathway. There are different forms of synaesthesia, the most common one being the grapheme-color synaesthesia, another common one the association of sounds with colors (chromesthesia). It is said that about 4% of the population experience synaesthesia. To give an example, when a synaesthete with grapheme-color synaesthesia sees a written word, they will involuntarily and automatically “see” or associate the individual letters of the word with a specific color, which is usually fixed and will always be the same. For example for me personally, the letter “A” is always dark blue, “R” is always black, “O” white and “S” salmon red, even though the shades of a letter can blend into the shade of the following or previous letter in a word, quite like a rainbow painted in watercolor. So each word will leave behind a sort of “rainbow trace”/color sensation in one’s memory. The color sensations each letter evokes are, however, specific to each person, so each synaesthete will have their own color associations for each letter or grapheme.  This is particularly useful when one wants to memorize long phone numbers for even if one doesn’t remember each single digit of the number in question, one is often able to ‘reconstruct’ the correct numbers with the aid of the color trace it left behind in your memory. For instance, if your association for the number 3 is always red and green for the number 2, when you don’t remember a particular sequence in your phone number, but still do remember that it was somehow reddish or greenish in the middle of your “rainbow sequence” you can make a good guess that the digits must be these two numbers. This also works for memorizing vocabulary when you learn a new language, even though to a lesser extent than with phone numbers.

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Another form of synaesthesia is chromesthesia, the association of sounds with color sensations. So when hearing a particular language, this will trigger certain specific color sensations in me which I have for this particular language. For example, Spanish triggers strong reddish-orangeish-yellowish color sensations in me when hearing it, whereas Polish triggers shades of black, white, grays, ochres and browns, Greek shades of ochres, orange and greens, and Russian black, white and shades of blue. I therefore associate each language I speak with a particular color sensation or color feeling I get when I hear it and I also like and prefer, or even dislike, particular languages just because of these sensations they spark, because some languages trigger a pleasant “color harmony” whereas others really trigger a jarring, unpleasant “color sensation”.

For me as a language learner this means that my synaesthesia makes me a highly visual learner who needs colors and pictures to be able to memorize vocabulary. Each letter of a word has a specific fixed color for me, and each word as a whole leaves a certain “rainbow sequence” in my memory (the colors of the individual letters can blend into each other so that they get slightly modified from their “fixed” shade, e.g. a “black” letter can turn to dark brown or dark blue depending on the letters that surround it – just like in a watercolor painting 🙂 ), so that I can sometimes reconstruct a word I don’t remember precisely any more but of which I still vaguely remember its color or rainbow sequence. So I actively use and reinforce my synaesthesia when learning a new language. By contrast, language learning methods based on totally ‘abstract’ memorization techniques don’t work for me at all.

Author: Dan Brady, Wikimedia Commons

Author: Dan Brady, Wikimedia Commons