The color in the eyes of language

PalmIt was towards the end of the 80s that I started seeing cars with metallic paint. They were colors that, to the eyes of a child from that time, were fascinating. An older boy told me that color was “turquoise green,” but another contradicted him, “it’s turquoise blue.” I didn’t know what to say. But the truth is they couldn’t agree on whether it was green or blue. It was a color in between, and we didn’t have a clear label for it. The confusion was total when another day another car appeared and a third person said, “what a great turquoise pink!” The cat was out of the bag, I thought. That boy identified the metallic effect with “turquoise.” So, who is right? The one who said “turquoise green” or the one who said “turquoise blue”? If we search online, we’ll see that both turquoise green and turquoise blue are used. Scottish Gaels lean towards ‘turquoise blue’ (‘tuirc-ghorm’) and the English, more pragmatically, simply say ‘turquoise’. How can it be that we see the same thing, but identify it differently?

According to language

. How can it be that we see the same thing, but identify it differently?

Linguists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay dedicated a good part of their careers to studying how the different languages of the five continents name colors. They proposed a very interesting theory for human languages: there is a closed inventory of color terms. And furthermore, there is a very specific evolution in expanding the color vocabulary. That is, languages do not increase specific color terms randomly, but rather follow very specific patterns.

Berlin and Kay showed that the minimum set of color terms was two: black and white. White for all warm colors and black for cool colors. Indeed, in these languages, the same word is used for white, red, and yellow; while the other word refers to black, green, and blue. If a language develops a third term, it will always be red. And if a fourth appears, it can be yellow or green. From the fifth onwards, things get complicated because there are several combinations. But it is still extraordinary that humans follow this order in the evolution of languages.

The maximum set of specific color terms is twelve, as for example in Russian, a language that differentiates between ‘dark blue’ (‘sinij’’) and ‘sky blue’ (‘goluboj’’). Notice that in Catalan we have to resort to ‘navy’ or ‘dark’ and ‘light’ or ‘sky’ to determine these two shades.

Berlin and Kay highlighted that the evolution of cultures goes hand in hand with the expansion of color term inventories. Small societies, with very low technical complexity, they said, tend to have the minimum of terms. In contrast, industrialized societies tend to have eleven (or more, like Russian). Sometimes these expansions happen quickly, borrowing words from neighboring languages. For example, Basque has the word ‘berde’, a clear indicator that the past did not differentiate green lexically.

In Spanish, we have also adopted terms from other languages. Both Moll and Corominas agree that the word ‘taronja’ was taken from Arabic (‘turunja’), and from the fruit we have obtained a new color label. In fact, colors like orange, lilac, pink, and gray would be terms from the last phase of all, according to Berlin and Kay's evolutionary model.

The vermilion and Spanish red

In Spanish, depending on the region and age of the speaker, a distinction can be made between ‘vermell’ and ‘roig’, the latter being slightly less intense. If we look at the Atles Lingüístic del Domini Català, we can see the uneven distribution of these two words in maps 1278 (vermell) and 1279 (roig). We will say “red earth”, “red hair”, “reddish sky”, but we say “terra de call vermell”. Various birds have ‘cap-roig’ accompanying their name: red-capped rail, red-crested pochard, red-billed chough, etc. We even have a plant called ‘cama-roja’. But on the other hand, there is “vermell d’ou”, or “we turn red”, there are “red lists” of species, one has “red skin” or a “red face” due to the sun or embarrassment. We must take into account that linguistic interference is also noticeable in this area. As Gabriel Bibiloni warned years ago, even though initially it was said “Creu Vermella”, it quickly became “Creu Roja”, possibly following the steps of Spanish. The same could have happened with the communists, Bibiloni said, who went from “vermells” to “rojos” and their “red army”. Other more modern expressions are also choosing ‘vermell’ instead of ‘roig’: red carpet, red traffic light. It seems, however, that the distinction between the two shades is unstable and is being lost in those territories where it was still perceived and classified.

In short, color systems are another reflection of the evolution of human languages, along with their culture.