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Colours are easy, right? They're one of the
first things you learn as a kid. Red, orange,

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yellow, green, blue, purple, white, black,
grey, brown, pink. And then when you learn

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other languages, all you have to do is learn
the new words for the same colours.

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Except. That's not the way it works. That
English colour system with its nicely defined

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names? It doesn't map onto other languages.

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Quick heads up: I am massively simplifying
here. Check the references if you want to

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know more details.

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The most common difference -- or at least,
the most commonly-studied difference -- is

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whether blue and green are different colours,
or different shades of the same colour, one

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which English linguistics refer to as grue.
Vietnamese, for example, uses the same basic

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word or lexeme for blue and green: they can
be literally translated as leaf grue or ocean

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grue.

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Does that seem weird? It shouldn't. That's
just a simple change in where you draw a line

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on the wheel of hues. The Ancient Greeks,
on the other hand, classified colours not

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by hue, but by lightness. So they had one
lexeme -- one main word -- for dark blue,

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green and brown... and one word for light
blues, greens and greys.

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We use one word, blue, for two very different
colours. But in Russian, there are two different

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words for what we'd call dark blue and light
blue. And that really shouldn't seem strange

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to English speakers, because that's exactly
what we do with dark red, and light red -- or

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as we call it, pink.

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In 1969, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay released
a book that claimed to track the evolution

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of colour in languages. According to Berlin
and Kay, languages start out with just words

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for dark-cool colours and light-warm colours,
then gain a word for red, then green and yellow,

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then blue, brown, and the rest of what English
refers to as the spectrum.

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There is some debate over how accurate this
is, and by some debate, I mean this is a really

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controversial subject in linguistics and has
been for decades. I'm skimming over the very

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basics here, but there are reams of research,
going into some very deep claims that I'm

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not vaguely qualified to discuss. Lots of
linguistics with very impressive degrees have

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very strong and very different opinions on
this.

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Something as apparently simple as colour differences
highlight just how tricky translation and

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cross-cultural communication can be. And the
debate goes a level deeper than that: it's

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about whether the words we know, and the languages
we learn, influence the way we interpret the

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world, just reflect our existing interpretations.
The answer is: I don't know. No-one does,

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really. Not yet. The answer is probably somewhere
in between, because language is complicated.

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People are complicated. And sometimes, things
really aren't just black and white.

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I really need to write better puns.

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