The color in the eyes of language

PalmaIt was around the late 80s that I started seeing cars with metallic paints. They were colors that to the eyes of a child of that time were a fascinating thing. An older boy told me that 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 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 said 'what a cool turquoise pink!'. We're fed up to the eyeballs, 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 Gaelic speakers 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

) and the English, more pragmatic, simply say ‘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 what's more, there is a very specific evolution when it comes to expanding the vocabulary of colors. That is to say, languages do not increase specific color terms haphazardly, but rather follow very specific patterns.

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

According to languageThe 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 emphasized 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 number 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 Catalan, we have also adopted terms from other languages. Both Moll and Corominas agree that the word 'taronja' was borrowed 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 the evolutionary model of Berlin and Kay.

The Catalan vermilion and red

In Catalan, depending on the area and the speaker's age, 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 on maps 1278 (vermell) and 1279 (roig). We will say “terra roja”, “cabells rojos”, “cel rogent”, but we say “terra de call vermell”. Several birds have ‘cap-roig’ accompanying their name: batarà cap-roig, picot cap-roig, morell cap-roig, etc. We even have a plant called ‘cama-roja’. But on the other hand there is the “vermell d’ou”, or “ens posam vermells”, there are “llistes vermelles” of species, one has “pell vermella” or “cara vermella” due to the sun or shame. We must take into account that linguistic interference is also noticeable in this area. As Gabriel Bibiloni warned years ago, although initially it was called “Creu Vermella”, it quickly became “Creu Roja”, possibly following the steps of Spanish. The same could have happened with the communists, said Bibiloni, who went from “vermells” to “rojos” and their “exèrcit roig”. Other more modern expressions also choose ‘vermell’ instead of ‘roig’: catifa vermella, semàfor vermell. 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 a further reflection of the evolution of human languages, alongside their culture.