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DailyDirt: Bullet The Blue
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
When people talk about colorful language, they’re usually referring to foul language. But more literally, words for colors in our language(s) can affect how we perceive and react to colors. The word for blue is particularly interesting due to its surprisingly infrequent use in older texts. Here are just a few links relating colors and words.
- Different languages describe colors in ways that sometimes can’t be translated exactly, and these linguistic definitions can affect how people perceive colors. The Russian language has very specific words for different shades of “blue” (and no term for “blue” in general), and Russians have distinctly different reactions to blue than English speakers do. [url]
- A color-coded analysis of various English texts according to word origins can show some interesting patterns that could be unique to certain genres of writing. British literature has more words from Anglo-Saxon origins, but other kinds of writing has different mixtures… if only spam were easily identified by this kind of analysis. [url]
- Ancient greeks wouldn’t have described the sky as blue…. Homer did not use “blue” at all, and maybe Greeks didn’t see colors the same way we do today. But other ancient civilizations didn’t use blue in their written languages, either. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) BestNetTech post.
Filed Under: blue, colors, english, greek, homer, language, russian
Comments on “DailyDirt: Bullet The Blue”
maybe we should just refer to colors by their wavelengths
remove all the ambiguity of language and just go with numbers.
That’s a nice shade of 650nm….
Re: maybe we should just refer to colors by their wavelengths
By definition, you can’t have shades within a single wavelength. 🙂 sorry.
The closest you can get is chroma.
And Glasgow means blue grass
Re: Glasgow
Glasgow refers to neither blue nor grass. Glas is green in gaelic, Gorm would be blue. The etymology of Glasgow would be approximately Green Hollow or similar.
青
蓝色 藍色
Синий
Azul
Blau
“Ancient greeks wouldn’t have described the sky as blue….”
Duh, if you’ve seen the old movies, everything was black and white back then.
There are fifty shades of grey…or so I’ve heard.
Russian, blue. Reminds me of Prussian Blue. Lynx and Lamb, gone from racists to dopeheads. A shame, too, because they’re hot.