Finally after what seems a lifetime away from mailart365 due to a bunch of crappy reasons, I'm finally back with this postcard which is going to Kiera Pannell who sent me a fantastic mailart recently - thanks!!
When I was at school, studying Shakespeare, I remember our teacher told us that the colour orange didn’t exist as a word as recently as just after medieval times. I’ve been unable to confirm how much truth there is in this statement, or when the colour did actually get “recognised” as it were. Some sources say that orange was just a shade of red or brown. Which makes you think about whether anything was actually coloured orange in the eyes of people living in the times when orange did not exist. So, your mandarins, oranges and satsumas were all a shade of red or tan. It’s an odd thing.
We see so many shades of blue, for instance, in the sea, the sky, flowers etc. Imagine if one of these was suddenly granted a name - would anything predating that time be the “colour of that colour”?
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#7 L-plate when is an orange not orange?
January 15, 2011 at 6:37 PM
Welcome back L-plate! In Vietnamese we have only one word fro green and blue, which we describe as "Breen/blue like the sky" or "Green/blue like grass"
I find it very odd coming from an English speaking background.
I've tried to grill Elena about Romanian, which has three grenders for it's nouns. To me, gender is very odd for all nouns, but for her it's perfectly natural that all mice are male and all birds are female. To name a rose a rose is one thing, but to have the conception of a rose is to know it. I guess that language allows us to transfer our conception from one to another, so where they didn't have the colour orange perhaps this only means that all such sightings are lost in our recorded history
January 15, 2011 at 11:32 PM
Its definitely a big question about what gets lost in recorded history, especially given the fact our society is increasingly driven by a reliance on understanding historical data. That data is by definition inconsistent and unreliable if terminology is changing through time.
January 15, 2011 at 11:34 PM
and the gender of nouns is an interesting one too - funny how in some languages cats are always female and in others always male. Paperclips, tables and chairs can all be transexual depending on who's talking about them. Those poor, confused things.
August 13, 2012 at 11:06 PM
Color names are interesting as well as color concepts. I teach a color course and am fascinated by the subject and everything to do with color, which amazes people who know me as my wardrobe consists mainly of black clothing. WELCOME back "L."
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