Who decided what colour was called what?

Question

e.g. Our sky is "Blue"... why is "blue" called "blue" or "green" called "green"... Does it stem back to Latin as a lot of words do?

Answer 1

Language evolves through natural selection and feedback from it's environment. That is why English is a little different between Texas and New York, more different between England, Australia, and the USA, even more different from Shakespeare's day, and almost unrecognizable from Old English. It is also not interchangeable with the other species of languages from which it evolved, such as Latin, Old German (Angle and Saxon), Celtish (Briton), and old French.

Answer 2

People don't 'decide' what words to use. They learn the language as babies. The words are already there around them.

The most basic English colour terms (red, yellow, green, blue, black, brown, grey, white) are all native. They're not borrowed from Latin, but go back to Old English and before that Proto-Germanic, and before that get lost in the mists of time.

Some of them are recognizably related to words in other branches of Indo-European, e.g. red matches Latin _ruber_ and Greek _erythros_. Yellow is related to the corresponding Slavonic names. (Related to as in cousins, not descendants.) Colour names can also change meaning rather a lot: blue seems to be related to Latin _flavus_, which means yellow.

If you go back even further (not that we can with any certainty) some of these might turn out to be from common names: green looks like grass, and yellow looks like gall (the bodily fluid) and/or gold. So, many thousands of years ago there might not have been basic colour names for yellow and green in Proto-Indo-European, and they called green things grass-coloured.

Virtually all words are just arbitrary noises. The sounds [blu:] happen to mean that colour in English, but every language uses a different and equally arbitrary name for it. No-one 'decides'.

Answer 3

Each colour is named from different languages. Some stem from latin, as you say, others are from old english etc. I think it's the same with anything like this, the most commonly used word gets accepted as the norm. Red, a colour almost always called red is referred to differently depending on its shade and the kind of image people want to conjure up of that colour. The same with most colours, the emotion one wants to convey by referring to it, puts the word for the colour in your mouth. Hope this is a little more informative than "who cares".

Answer 4

Any good collegiate dictionary will give etymologies for most words. In case of blue, blue is from from Old French by way of Middle English and green is from Old English by way of Middle English, both according to Webster. These words are not related to Latin.

Answer 5

Good question. You could say that of many words. You can keep tracing them back and back - latin, roman...etc

But eventually you come to the guy who first decided what we would call the colour 'green'. And from what basis did he get that word? It can scramble your brain trying to think that one through. I'm sorry - don't think I really answered the question!

Answer 6

To be honest, I have no idea who named the colours, but found this on old faithful!

As an aside, have you ever thought that the colour you know of as blue may be different to the colour that I know as blue? After all, we only know what blue is only because we have been told that is what the colour is called! We both know the sea is blue - but how can we be sure we are looking at the same colour? Are our brains seeing the colour in the same way? If we were to look through someone else's eyes, would we think their world was made up of very odd colours?

Back to the question:
Color naming
Different cultures have different terms for colors, and may also assign some color names to slightly different parts of the spectrum: for instance, the han character 青 (rendered as qīng in Mandarin and ao in Japanese) has a meaning that covers both blue and green; blue and green are traditionally considered shades of "青". In more contemporary terms, they are 藍 (lán, in Mandarin) and 綠 (lǜ, in Mandarin) respectively. For example, in Japan, although the traffic lights have the same red and yellow lights that other countries have, the "green" light is markedly "bluer" and is called aoi.

Similarly, languages are selective when deciding which hues are split into different colors on the basis of how light or dark they are. Apart from the black-grey-white continuum, English splits some hues into several distinct colors according to lightness: such as red and pink or orange and brown. To English speakers, these pairs of colors, which are objectively no more different from one another than light green and dark green, are conceived as totally different. A Russian will make the same red-pink and orange-brown distinctions, but will also make a further distinction between sinij and goluboj, which English speakers would simply call dark and light blue. To Russian speakers, sinij and goluboj are as separate as red and pink or orange and brown.

Color terms evolve. It is argued that there are a limited number of universal "basic color terms" which begin to be used by individual cultures in a relatively fixed order. For example, a culture would start with only two terms, meaning roughly 'dark' (covering black, dark colors and cold colors such as blue ) and 'bright' (covering white, light colors and warm colors such as red), before adding more specific color names, in the order of red; green and/or yellow; blue; brown; and orange, pink, purple and/or gray. Older arguments for this theory also stipulated that the acquisition and use of basic color terms further along the evolutionary order indicated a more complex culture with more highly developed technology.

A somewhat dated example of a universal color categories theory is Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969) by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. A more recent example of a linguistic determinism theory might be Is color categorisation universal? New evidence from a stone-age culture (1999) by Jules Davidoff et al. The idea of linguistically determined color categories is often used as evidence for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Language, Thought and Reality (1956) by Benjamin Lee Whorf).

Additionally, different colors are often associated with different emotional states, values or groups, but these associations can vary between cultures. In one system, red is considered to motivate action; orange and purple are related to spirituality; yellow cheers; green creates cosiness and warmth; blue relaxes; and white is associated with either purity or death. These associations are described more fully in the individual color pages, and under color psychology.

Answer 7

Whoever started the language of course

Answer 8

Don't try to think too much!

Just keep taking the medication.

Answer 9

who cares?

Answer 10

God or someone i suppose