Let’s make a language – Part 15a: Color terms (Intro)

Once you have the grammar parts figured out, most of the rest of the conlanging process is making words. We began to see that in Part 14, when we discussed deriving new words from existing roots. This time around, we’re going back to the roots (pun intended) and looking at a very specific set of words: the color terms.

Color terms are, well, terms for colors. They’re the names you see on crayons or paint swatches. As anyone who has been to a hardware store knows, there are thousands of these, but we’ll focus on the absolute basics. Most colors are named after things that are that color, like “violet” or “salmon”. A few, however, are truly basic: “red”, “yellow”, “black”, and so on. These are the ones that most interest us here.

More importantly, which color terms are considered “basic” turns out to be a way in which languages differ. That makes this subject an excellent illustration of how a language can divide up the “semantic space”. Not every language is the same in this respect, and realizing that is a good step towards creating a more naturalistic conlang, rather than a simple cipher of your native tongue.

The color hierarchy

Every language has at least two basic colors. That seems to be a linguistic and cultural universal. But according to a study by Berlin and Kay (1969), what comes next follows a fairly regular trajectory. To be sure, there are outliers, but the past few decades have only reinforced the notion of a developmental hierarchy of color terms, making it a useful model for conlangs.

The first distinction in color is near-universal: light and dark. This can also be black and white or warm and cool; the specifics won’t matter too much. Mostly, yellow and red fall in with white in this scheme, while blue and green are dark. Other colors, like purple, brown, or orange, fall in somewhere along this spectrum. Exactly where is different for each language. It’s easy to see pink as “light” and purple as “dark”, but what about a soft lavender or a deep ruby?

At some point, probably fairly early in a culture’s history, a new color term comes about, splitting “light” into white and red. This seems obvious, as blood is red, and it’s a very important part of humanity. Yellow also tends to get lumped in with red in this scheme, meaning that most oranges do, too.

The next two colors to “break off” are green and yellow, in either order. Green can come first or yellow can, but they both need to be present before the next stage can begin. Once a language has these five color terms—black, white, red, green, yellow—then it’s on to the sixth and final major color: blue.

These six are the main group, then, and there’s a very good reason why. Human vision, as anybody who took biology knows, has two key parts: rods and cones. The rods are monochromatic, distinguishing only light and dark; in other words, just like a two-color-term language. The cones, however, are how we see color. They come in three flavors, roughly corresponding to red, green, and blue.

So that’s probably a good explanation for the first six basic color terms. Red has the longest wavelength, so it’s the easiest to see, hence why stop signs and a car’s brake lights are red. It stands to reason that it would be singled out first. The eye’s green cones tend to be the most sensitive, but green and yellow are pretty close together, spectrally speaking, so they’re the next two, but their similarity leads to the flip-flop in which comes first. And then that leaves blue.

What about the others, though? Well, there it gets murky. Brown is usually the seventh basic color, distinguished from red and yellow. After that, there’s no real set order among the next four: orange, pink, purple, and gray. But those eleven, possibly accompanied by one or more lighter or darker shades (cyan, magenta, azure, etc.), make up the core color terminology of the majority of languages.

The rest of the box

All the other colors’ names will be derived in some way, and that can include some from the above list, if a language doesn’t have a full complement of basic terms. One way of doing this is with adjectives that specify a particular shade of a color. English has lots of these: dark, light, pale, deep, etc. The new color names produced with them aren’t single words, but phrases like “dark blue” or “pale pink”; other languages might have ways of compounding them, though.

Compounds give us another way of making new color words. By combining two basic colors, we can get new ones. That’s how we have “red-orange” or “blue-green”, to name but two. They’re in-between colors, and they tend to be composed of two colors adjacent on the spectrum. It’s hard to imagine a “yellow-blue” that isn’t green, for instance.

Another possibility is the abstract color word. These aren’t basic terms; instead, they tend to come about as finer distinctions of shade. They may have started off with some other meaning, but they now refer almost exclusively to a specific range of colors. Maroon and cyan are a couple of English examples.

By far, though, the best way of making names for colors is through description. Something that has a certain color becomes a descriptor for that particular color—“navy blue”, for instance—then, eventually, the color’s name. That’s how it worked for salmon, coral, violet, lavender, and hundreds of others. It may have even been the case for orange, as the fruit’s name seems be older than the color term. And if the original reason for one of these names is lost, then it may come to be considered an abstract term; indigo is one color that has gone through this process.

Using all these, a language can easily fill up even the biggest box of crayons. But the more color terms you have, the less of the color space each one covers. There will be overlap, of course, and the general terms will always cover more area than the more specific ones. And every language makes its own distinctions. The border between, say, red and yellow isn’t set in stone.

Even weirder

A few conlangers like making languages for speakers that aren’t ordinary humans. Since we’re moving into more culture-specific parts of language, this is a good opportunity to look at what needs to be done for that sort of conlang.

If the prevailing theory is accurate, basic color terms come about in the order they do because of human vision, as we saw above. A race that doesn’t follow normal human rules, however, will have a different color hierarchy. Some people, for example, have a fourth set of cone cells, purportedly letting them see otherwise “impossible” colors. Tetrachromats, as they’re called, effectively have a fourth primary color at their disposal.

An entire race (in the literary sense) of tetrachromats would have a language that reflects this. Where their fourth color fits into the hierarchy would depend on the specifics of how that fourth cone cell works, but it would certainly be in that first group alongside red, green, yellow, and blue.

Similarly, red-green colorblindness could be the norm for a race. In that case, red and green wouldn’t differentiate, obviously, but the rest of the diminished color space would also be changed. In fact, it’s easy to imagine such a race never getting past the light/dark stage.

And no discussion of color vision would be complete without including the neighboring portions of the spectrum. The human lens blocks ultraviolet, but some people report being able to see it. Vision reaching into the infrared is a little more plausible for our species. Aliens, though, could have their equivalent to cones reach their peak sensitivity at different points of the spectrum, allowing them to see into the deeper or higher ranges. Their color terms would likely reflect this, and an alien race could have a whole collection of words for color combinations that we simply cannot see.

Next up

Next time, we’ll look at our two conlangs and their color words. Then, it’ll be off to another part of the semantic realm, but I don’t yet know exactly which one. Stay tuned.

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