Happy Thought for 28 July 2023

Have a Happy Thought:

 After many (many) days of rain, New Zealand skies have been a beautiful shade of blue (for at least parts of the day).

 

A Harakeke flax flower against a deep blue sky, Phormium tenax. Photo by author.

 The other amazing thing is that we in the English language have a word that describes that colour! Because, you see, not all languages have a word for “blue”. This absolutely messed with my mind when I first found out that, for example, the language that Homer used when compiling the Iliad and the Odyssey, didn’t yet have a word for blue. This is why you get lots of euphemisms like “wine-dark sea” or the bronze sky.

 

It’s not just ancient Greek, though – many languages don’t (or didn’t at one time) have a word for blue.

And, it turns out, there is a pattern to when and how languages “add” colours to their lexicon.

 

Basically, you start off with the two really basic Dark and Light (or think in terms of Black and White, or Dull and Shiny)

Then you add Red

Then either Yellow or Green

Then whichever of Yellow or Green you didn’t have

Only then will you come to Blue

And after that you get Brown

And after that you get, in some order, Pink, Purple, Orange, and Grey

 

There’s even a flow-chart, all languages work their way from left to right:

Chart from http://www.people.vcu.edu/~djbromle/color-theory/color04/melissa/evolcolterm.htm

 

Which starts to explain how Homer could use the same colour-term for wine, the ocean, and cattle: it’s a colour, but it’s not black or white. And it’s not like bronze (the metal), which probably occupied either the green or yellow colours-space.

 

By the way, this is why in a recent update of the emoji keyboard, we got pink and grey hearts to add to the rest of them – the team behind emojis wanted to make sure to cover all of the “basic 11” colours!

🖤🤍❤️💚💛💙🤎💜🩷🧡🩶

In case you get a few weird symbols instead of hearts at the end of that list, here’s what it should look like, once your Unicode has updated:

 

(For example, my text messaging app shows the hearts properly, in colour, but my email does not!)

  

For more on emojis and the Unicode Consortium, flashback to a Happy Thought from May of this year

For more on languages developing words for colours, check out http://www.people.vcu.edu/~djbromle/color-theory/color04/melissa/evolcolterm.htm

And thanks to Alie Ward and the Ologies team for an amazing podcast about emojis https://www.alieward.com/ologies/curiology