How 5 Classic Colours Got Their Names
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- čas přidán 15. 06. 2024
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What's the best colour and why is it "Name Explain Green"? also buy my book or something.
Ghel could mean gold
Grey! Nice and cool. Name Explain Green is nice too, I guess. :P
I like green, green is cool
Yellow as Gold and Blue.
Yellow is joyful, Blue is tranquil.
Gold is lovable, Blue is popular.
Azure
When I was growing up, 'purple' seemed to be a low class name for the color, with the rainbow (the authoritative version of colors in my mind) instead splitting it into 'indigo' and 'violet', which never made sense to me.
I thought of indigo as a variant of blue instead of purple, and thought of violet as another name for purple.
@@want-diversecontent3887 same
Many languages also have a similar split for blue colors, with what counts as light blue in English being a totally different color to dark blue. English also has this with the differentiation between pink and red.
@@want-diversecontent3887 Becasue you're right. Indigo is dark blue and violet is purple.
@@want-diversecontent3887 Indigo is blue as the hue cyan is what they used to call blue. In a technical setting, violet is actually the color of black lights as it is a color that is so far on the blue side of the color spectrum it begins to activate your red cones again making it appear purple. This is also why the color spectrum afterwards is called ultraviolet.
“Green” is not just for wrestlers-a greenhorn is someone who is inexperienced.
'You look a little green' is also a similar use.. well, when someone isn't sick
Yeah, often greenie is used in a lot of fields to mean someone young and inexperienced.
Pretty interesting that the name of the snail 'purpura' is almost exactly the word for purple in Finnish, 'purppura'.
Púrpura in Spanish
@@Skyline25 TECHNICALLY its morado but i also hear pupura being used too though
@@piglinplayz8391 Technically it can also be violeta.
That explains the Minecraft "Purpur" block as well.
In Romanian "purpură" means a reddish nuance of purple.
The german names are almost everytime similar. At one time closer to the root:
Red - Rot
Yellow - Gelb
Blue - Blau
Green - Grün
Purple - Purpur
I've always heard the name of purple to be "Lila" in German? I've never heard "purpur" used
@@Emily-ox6yn It's lila in Swedish as well.
Red - Röd
Yellow - Gul
Blue - Blå
Green - Grön
Purple - Lila
@@Emily-ox6yn
Well, Lila, Purpur and Violett are very similar. I don't know, where the difference is, but there seems to be one. 🤷♂
In Dutch it is
Red - Rood
Yellow - Geel
Blue - Blauw
Green - Groen
Purple - Paars
@@Emily-ox6yn Purpur is specificaly used when speaking about the color of the royalty. But Lila is a much more common term.
In the US we use the term "Green" to mean anyone who's inexperienced in any profession. It's short for the phrase "Green behind the ears" which is apparently a German saying.
I’ve always thought about it as young and fresh - like a sprout. Versus seasoned which means having been through many cycles and is fully developed.
The phrase is "wet behind the ears." Perhaps you mean short for greenhorn.
Also in regards to car racing on a track, a track with no rubber on it (usually clean, brand new asphalt/tarmac) is called a ‘green’ track
where in the US? I live in the US and I've never heard it.
Yeah, it's used here in the Netherlands as well.
"Green grass grows." Great!
In Romance languages, the colour green is usually something like "vert" / "verde", which is related to "vertical", the direction that green things grow. Different, er, _root_. Same shared meanings.
Green as in new and inexperienced is used everywhere here in the states. Most commonly used in the context a profession that may be dangerous or disturbing and the rookie on the scene is still innocent and unaware of what they're about to experience!
Yeah there's also the word greenhorn. And an unbroken horse is green and a horse that's been trained to accept a rider but not much else is called greenbroke.
This was going to be my comment, as well. Maybe it's not used much in the UK anymore, but a noob being "green" is still very common here in the US.
Green is used a lot in wargaming and possibly the military.
It's nice to see how these explanations still work for the colors in other languages - since not all explanations are so transferable.
In German we have: rot, gelb, blau, grün and ... well there is purpur for the specific reddish tone of royal clothes dyed with the original purpura-snails, but the common name in German would definitely be "lila" or maybe "violett" - which is related to the English words lilac and violet for two flowers in the same called colour. So 4/5 fit for my language as well - thumbs up and Frohe Ostern!
Yellow in Japanese seems to have a similar origin to that of English from its own roots, where yellow (黄) is pronounced "Ki", and the word for shine or sparkle (キラキラ) is "Kirakira".
5:46 in my native language(croatian) we actually do have one word for blue and blonde (plav/plava, depends on gender) so whenever someone is describing a person and says they have blonde/blue hair, i don’t know whether they mean blonde or blue, so i ask ‘wait like the real blue or like yellow?’ lmao
4:20 In fact, in OE, geolu and dæg were the spellings of [yeolu] and [dæy], since a real letter y was pronounced like German ü and was also used for Umlauts.
Example of the latter : gold - gylden = gold - gilded / golden.
And while you do have hard g in German gelb, Tag(es), the shift making k sound and hard g sound into ch (spelled c) and y (spelled g) in certain contexts is common to English and Frisian, and therefore had happened, not after William the Conqueror but most likely even before Horse and Hengest.
Thank you for saying this! The number of different ways 'g' can be pronounced in OE is insane. Tip for Patrick: if it comes before the vowels e or i, it's pronounced like a ModE Y [j] the vast majority of the time. The word for "yes" was "giese" and the "ge" prefix on past participles became y- in Middle English, like in "yclept" for "was named".
@@evan-moore22 The Middle English spelling is a new start of writing English. 1166 you have the last texts in the old spelling (last entries in Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, I think) and it's later that English gets written again, and the spelling system chosen is French spelling. This obviously also means that Old English Y becomes Middle English U, graphically. And Y becomes used as "i grec" (Greek I).
@@hglundahl well, kinda. English lost the high front rounded vowel (/y/, Greek υ, German ü), but it didn't get replaced with "u." Old English had /u/ as well, like in hūs (house). Words that were spelled with the y became pronounced with an /i/, so the word "Dryhten" (/dɾyxtʰen/) became "Dryghten" (/dɾixtʰɛn/) (exact dialect can affect the second vowel sound and the fricative).
@@evan-moore22 I was not talking about the sound changes.
I was talking about the spelling.
/y/ was y, became u
/j/ was g, became y
/i/ was i only, became i or y.
If Dryhten had been kept in Middle English, it would have been spelled Drughten.
/u:/ was u, became ou.
The sound change /y/ > /i/ (usually) came later, within the Middle English period (hull > hill).
In Polish;
Red - Czerwony
Orange - Pomarańczowy (never forget about Orange)
Yellow - Żółty
Green - Zielony
Purple - Fioletowy
Blue - Niebieski
Thank you! I was hoping to learn about orange :)
Am I correct in guessing that 'pomarańczowy' is essentially 'red, but the shade from that one fruit'? or is that incorrect?
Also, u m a m i
@@HungerGamesFan88
It comes from the Old French "Pomme d'Orange" meaning "Apple-Orange".
Contribution comment.❤ It is interesting how colour names are different in different languages. :) What are colours called in your language? I start with Finnish: Punainen - red. Keltainen - yellow I think this video also explained this. Sininen - blue. Vihreä - green.
This is a list of common colors in Romanian :). "Purpuriu" is rather uncommon nowadays.
Red = Roșu
Orange = Portocaliu (the fruit and color )
Yellow = Galben
Green = Verde
Cyan = Turcoaz
Blue = Albastru (yep blue and white share the same latin word for white : albus)
White = Alb
Purple = Purpuriu/Mov/Lila/Violet
Pink = Roz
Brown = Maro
Grey = Gri
Black = Negru
Very interesting that in Russian "blue" seemed to have instead become "white" - belyj, and the word for "blue" itself is a loanword from the Finnic languages - sinij.
Hungarian here
Red - piros
Blue - kék
Green - zöld
Yellow - sárga
Brown - barna
Cyan - türkiz(kék)
Pink - rózsaszín
White - fehér
Black - fekete
Grey - szürke
Orange - narancssárga
Purple - lila
Swedish:
Red - Röd
Orange - Orange
Yellow - Gul
Green - Grön
Light blue - Ljusblå
Blue/dark blue - Blå/mörkblå
Purple - Lila
Pink - Rosa
White - Vit
Gray - Grå
Black - Svart
Serbian:
Red - crvena/црвена
Blue - plava/плава
Yellow - žuta/жута
Green - zelena/зелена
Purple - ljubičasta/љубичаста
Pink - roze/розе or ružičasta/ружичаста
Orange - narandžasta/наранџаста
Brown - braon/браон or smeđa/смеђа
Black - crna/црна
White - bela/бела
Gray - siva/сива
Romanian:
Red = roșu
(pronounced ro-shuh)
Yellow = galben
(gall-ben)
So probably from the same root word, but kept the G at the beginning.
Light blue = bleu
Normal blue = albastru (al-bass-true)
Green = verde (ver-deh)
To grow = a crește (cresh-teh)
Purple = purpuriu (older word, less often used) / mov (current word, from mauve)
I'm italian and i always had the notion that red was the color of royalty because "porpora" as i knew it was a shade of red, so after watching this video i looked it up and there are actually variations of that color. Kind of mindblowing that the same name, referring to the same thing, end up as a different color.
Blue sea??? Are you sure you're British??
The sky is Blue the sea very rarely so near us. (Though of course it was more where Greek came from though they used the same word as for Bronze, blue is a late colour compared to Black and White and Red.
In some cultures Green and Blue are pretty interchangeable
In the restaurant/bar industry, we call the new inexperienced employees green as well. My favorite color name origin is chartreuse. Not my favorite color, but my favorite name origin!
"Yellow is named after the yellow sun"
Proto Indo-Europeans looking directly up at the perfectly white sun:
"Ahh yes, Yellow"
Ahhh my eyes, I'm blind
I didn't expect "yellow" to come from the same word as "gul" in the Scandinavian languages. Only "purple" how has a different origan (alltho "Violet" does, so you should have mentioned this name too).
I read somewhere that the fewer the syllables the more important the word to a culture. Makes sense for red, blue, green, etc.
Government
@@NikTehWafel 😂
germany words are just usually short, nothing special abou that
@@NikTehWafel Tax, state
@@Vitorruy1 I thought it was exactly the other way around. Doesn't each german word have like 75 letters?
Really enjoyed this. Very interesting how blue and yellow are similar in origin.
Old English and other Germanic languages pronounce Dag/Daeg as Day, the G give a a subtle Y sound
Another example of the letters G and Y being linked is the northern English dialect word " geld" - meaning infertile as in a cow. The Scots word for the same type of cow is " yell or yeld". Of course geld gives us the word " gelding" for a castrated horse.
You're great at saying words!
Newton and his favorite indigo lol
The colour orange is named after the orange fruit, the orange fruit got it's name from the orange tree, I'm not sure why the tree was called orange though. Orange was originally called Yellow-Red.
Probably from nerange/neranji, a fruit like orange in mediterranean.
In Spanish we have the term "está verde" (it's green) to mean when something is unripe
And Also for when concrete isn't cured
In English we also refer to unripe fruits and vegetables as being green.
G in old english was sometimes pronounced like (consonant) Y
dæg = dæy
geolu = yeolu
I didn't mind you reading directly from your book! if you have more in your books that you've never covered then you got content lol! also im running to buy your books asap
Some of us older farts still use greenhorn as a term for a noob.
Aqua means "water colored" from Latin
It's a shade of neon blue
Lemon is named after the fruit(neon yellow)
Orchid is named after the flower(neon purple)
Coral is named after the animal(neon red)
6:35 or in Dutch: groen gras groeit.
8:09 normally we call purple paars in Dutch, but another, lesser used word for it is: purper. That's what we settled on.
In hungarian, we say zöldfülű, meaning green eared when somebody is new to something.
Purple is the color that cool people like, don't @ me
purple and pink are best
"Purpura" is the name for little red spots that appear on the skin when capillaries break and leak blood before they're repaired. If it's due to a lack of platelets, it's "thrombocytopenic purpura." Wonder how red spots and purple color are linked?
Orange: "fck my drag right"
Well, the five other simple colours that come to mind are brown, black, white, orange, and magenta. I do know that brown and black are linked, and pink comes from an old word that meant lush or blush; referring to the soft pinks of wildflowers. Although I may be off on the pink bit cause I don’t remember for certain.
In Japan "blue hair" refers to bright colored hair(like Serbian plav)
Blue refers to reddish,yellowish shades of hair(literally tea colored,like green tea)
This video made me ask myself, why do we associate with certain tangible or intangible objects, and now I have existential dread
Or think of it this deeply... how do you know you see the same color for blue that I do? We were always told that a specific hue is blue (or red, yellow, etc.) So that hue has that name associated with it... how do you know I don't actually see the same color as what you see as red, but you were always told that was blue, so that's what you call it... quite the conundrum...
@@robertmagyar4884 Exactly, what if we all are just seeing everything differently
Would love a deep dive into the etymology of magenta, cyan, azure, and chartreuse.
4:14 Dæg is indeed still dag in Dutch. Likewise, ghel is (still +-) geel in Dutch and means yellow.
I'm glad Dutch didn't go through so many shifts as English or German did.
It's strange about the snail and purple. In Hebrew the same is true for the color "tchelet", that is, cyan or sky blue. In biblical times this color was extracted from sea snails and was used to dye the ritual pray cloth used by jews. I wonder if these are two different snails, producing different colors or somehow the same color changed its meaning during the ages and what was purple in reality is now considered cyan.
Maybe תכלת - tchelet is related to תכולה (contents), the contents of the sea snails.
My guess is the former. The color produced from sea snails. Keep in mind also that color is a continuum, and the original users of that word may have seen the two colors as shades of the same thing the way we see sky blue and navy blue as the same color.
Natural dyes can be changed when you change their PH level. For example, yellow from curcuma/turmeric becomes red, so blue to purple wouldn’t surprise me.
Oh my God, I've literally always wanted to know this
My easter egg coloring kit has bhleg(indigo),ghre(teal),ghel(gold) and reudh(fuchsia)
Green also means young/immature when referring to fruit. A green apple is one that hasn't fully ripened.
That would make sense for tomatos, but for apples, the color depends on variety, not age.
took to me way too long to realize pie was meant to be proto-indo-european lol
The Dutch word for Yellow is Geel (ee pronounced like the English hail, but with a Dutch G in front of it.) Now I finally know how the English one came to be and that they are related :)
i think the word blue may come from the blue base of flames, especially given the other meanings of "flash" and "burn"
red/rot/rouge/rosso is all clearly related. But the colours for white and black seem to come from a number of different roots in the european languages.
1:11 *peak acting* wowowowowowow
4:30 well... In Icelandic the color called "yellow" in English... is "Gul" or "Gulur" also "Gult" day in English is Dagur in Icelandic.
Icelandic has 3 forms of names for each color. (Rauð, Rauður and Rautt, Græn, Grænn and Grænt, Blá, Blár and blátt -
the "gender" of a word - she,he,it - controls what form of color name is used)
Icelandic has the "most" nordic or german words as is "most unchanged for the last 1000 years"
An Icelandic smith made the (now) only in Icelandic letters when the printing press was invented and thus we kept all those letters you in England lost... Ð or Ð, Þ or þ, æ or Æ and we also have a lot of letters like Á,É,Í,Ó,Ú... that we use every day and in lot of names.
I'm sure that B&Q claims to sell 68,000 paint colours...or they did a few years ago - it's probably more now.
What is the background music called?
A shade means darker, for the sky, the color would be a tint of Azure-Blue.
What is a thing with violetti/violett and purppura/purpur ?
The fact that orange is just always not mentioned
So, are you going to analyse Al Read's wallpapering sketch from a linguistic perspective.....😉
You skipped orange because?
Old English G (sometimes, at least, and I don’t remember the rules) sounds more like modern Y. “Dæg”, for example, sounds more like Eliza Doolittle saying “day” in My Fair Lady, if you’re familiar with that one.
Does Glow also come from Gealu?
The ‘green is inexperienced’ thing in wrestling is actually also in Dutch, but not just with wrestling, but with anything. Our word for ‘newbie’ is just the word ‘green’ with a diminutive suffix: ‘groentje’.
Green is still used this way in English. It tends to have a more unfavorable connotation, implying that the person is inexperienced in a bad way.
There’s also this thing in some student unions which is called ‘ungreening’ (‘ontgroenen’), where you have to do something to be initiated.
Yeah I have no idea why he used the specific example of professional wrestling since it's still universal in English to refer to an inexperienced person as green. We also call untrained horses green and horses that have been trained to accept a rider but aren't "finished" are known as green broke.
I need to know what the color orange did to be disrespected in this way
Meanwhile in polish:
Red -Czerwony ❌ (comes from 'czerw', a name for lavae of the Polish cochineal (a kind of bug) that was used to get red dye)
Yellow - Żółty ✅ (it connects all the way back to '*ghel-', same as in english)
Blue -- Niebieski ❌ (it's a combination of the portugal 'niebosa' and the polish suffix '-ski'. The word also once meant and still reffers to objects in the sky, which is why in polish celestial objects are called 'ciała niebieskie')
Green - Zielony ✅ (it stems from the polish word for herbs 'zioło', and that word appearently connects back to the protoindoeuropean '*ghel-', which supposedly reffered to all shades of green and yellow) [someone fact check this I am not too sure]
Purple - Fioletowy ❌ (comes from 'fiołek' (voila, which is a kind of a violet (as in the flower, not the color))
(reddish purple - purpurowy ✅)
Is the last one magenta?
@@gljames24 no, it's just that there's no real name in english for that color. In polish you can essentially create any color you want with the suffix '-owy', for example 'czekoladowy' is a chocolate-brown color.
Speaking as an artist there are only six colours plus black, white and earths. All the rest are shades of the above. On the other hand I have ultramarine AND Prussian blue, red iron oxide, cadmium red AND vermillion in my paint box. (but no purple)
An inexperienced wrestler* being described as "green" is news to me, but the term "green" is simply a shortened version of "greenhorn" - a person who is new to or inexperienced at a particular activity.
Greenhorn or green is used in many activities and occupations.
*I know nothing about wrestling.
I would opine that green - the adjective - would have more likely been added to the "horn" in greenhorn, so that the meaning of greenhorn is actually derived from green, rather than the other way around.
That just seems to make more etymological sense to me, as opposed to an independent development.
wow hard dis towards the third tertiary color
Re "green": I wonder of its connection to the name of the hunger-related hormone known as ghrelin. 🤔
But, what about orange? :c
I'm a Mandarin speaker, and the color yellow has a TOTALLY different meaning in our language 😅
What would that be?
5 colours in French:
Purple = Violet
Green = Vert
Blue = Bleu
Red = Rouge
Yellow = Jaune
Is that why jaundice is called the way that it is?
I have a very interesting topic idea. How the word “Bluetooth” came to be. Apparently It has a very fascinating history. I understand if you don’t do a full video on it, but at least look into it. I think you would find it very interesting.
Tom Scott has a great video on it already if you want a video on it right now.
In hungarian:
Sárga
Piros
Lila
Kék
Zöld
Try to guess which is which!
Wow! a hungarian word with less than 56 letters
English: red
German: Rot
French: Rouge
Italian: Rosso
Spanish: Rojo
Portuguese: VERMELHO
The Portuguese stems from the colour between red and orange: vermillion. Like the top colour of the Dutch flag: that's vermillion. Not red
But many people think the top colour of the Dutch flag is red, not vermillion. The confusion is therefore understandable.
If my memory is working, Rosa in Portuguese refers to pink, and Roxo (ro-sho) is purple.
Another color in Portuguese that doesn’t seem to come from the Latin is Cinza, or grey.
Geole looks like it may have also become glow?
Is it true that orange takes its name from the fruit?
I was wondering why Orange was left out actually... 🤔 is Orange 🍊 named for the fruit? Or the fruit 😋 for the color Orange?
I could've sworn the "g" in daeg and geolu had a dot on top, which already meant the "y" sound actually.
What about Orange?
'Day' in Danish is spelt 'dag', but pronounced closer to our 'day'. Norwegian and Swedish are notorious for sounding G like Y. Göteborg (Gothenberg) is yuh-tuh-bor-y'.
So blame the Vikings, not the Normans!
"Yellow" in German is "gelb". So it's very close to the original...
"Red" and "rot", "blue" and "blau" and "green" and "grün" are already quite close to each other.
"Purple" and "violett"/"lila" are different story, as the German versions are both very different to each other and to the English and the original word.
Makes me wonder where the German words come from...
lilacs and violets are flowers.
lilac and violet are shades of purple in English, so its not that far off
Dutch geel is closer to the original. Sorry, I hate to break it to you, but current German is barely Germanic anymore :D. That's exaggerating but it strays far from original old Germanic.
@@PendelSteven So? Good to know, but you make it seem like claimed any of that?!
Danish, Swedish and even English are also Germanic languages (and there are many more) - all with different variations and a different lingual evolution. And NEITHER is better than the other.
And why wouldn't it stray? We're talking a couple of millennia here. Most languages change "radically" within a few centuries...
I have a friend with color lastname, but not in the english language
Is Yellow and Hello related
That could be true, interesting... Yellow being associated with light, or day, or sun , etc. And Hello being a greeting associated with what you do at the start of your day or the beginning, greeting someone in the start of the day with a hello? Who knows...
the murex and the colour purple remind me of the shulker in minecraft
Puce is named after the colour of a blood gorged parasite and Beige is named after sewerage.
Wah. No orange? I realize it's probobly just the same as the fruit but still. You almost had a complete rainbow here
❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
4:56 The what? Pie?
Interessting: "GRELL" in german means when the light is shining verry heavely 😅 (yellow)
In Serbian we still refer to blonde people as blue haired
Iblis how at the end one of the backgrounds he uses is orange, the one common color he didn't explain XD
what about orange
Where's Orange? The three primaries where there, not the three secondaries. Guess I'll have to buy the book ...
In the US or at least in Michigan we use "green" for everyone new to something, why you only use wrestlers I found odd.
The omission of orange saddens me.
Orange and brown?
Brown is Dark Orange (or Orange mixed with Black)
@@robertmagyar4884 Yeah, I know .... but I'm interested in the names....
@@k.c1126 ah, I see... The word brown comes from Old English “brún,” used for any dusky or dark shade of color. Brown represents earthiness. While brown might be considered a little dull compared to the other colors, brown also represents simplicity, health, and dependability. Etymology. In English, the colour orange is named after the appearance of the ripe orange fruit. The word comes from the Old French: orange, from the old term for the fruit, pomme d'orange.
❤
Orange?
I’m sorry, Elephant Breath? I must’ve misheard that, right? What possible colour could _Elephant Breath_ be? Maybe it’s one of those ineffable colours Lovecraft kept buggering on about.
Orange rn be like :(