Why do we call blue 'blue' when in other languages it's like 'azure'?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ต.ค. 2024
- Why do we call blue 'blue' in English? And what can a gallery tell us about a very special name for the colour in other languages?
I was one of 20 Creative Collaborators across the country selected to make social media content for the National Gallery's 200th birthday. I wanted to go a step further and turn it into a film - my first of hopefully many on the stories of language and colour. You can find out more about the commission here: www.nationalga...
Some languages have a blue colour term that comes from neither blao nor lāžward. What do you call it in your language?
Filming: Alessandro Sorenti
Produced and edited by me
This was the first film in Language and Colour. What colour should I do next - and where should I do it?
Sources:
eragem.com/new...
• COLOUR WORDS: The asto...
• Why Is Blue So Rare In...
The Colour Code by Paul Simpson
The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair
Silk Road Map by Kevin Case - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
as a lot of you have spotted, this is my first video like this. been making content on TikTok for 5 years and this is my first TH-cam visual essay attempt - to see it get 16k views has just blown my mind. Thank you for watching (and for the audio advice 😅) I can’t wait to make you more stuff. Let me know what you’d like to watch!!!
21k now 🔥
I have been an artist for many years and I love discussing art history, theory, and more. I'm delighted to have discovered your channel and to have subscribed to it.
This is very well produced, feels very professional. You're off to a great start. Damn.
Love your passion for knowledge keep doing things you are passionate about it shines through your work
This is so much better for us oldies than ... what's that site you mentioned? TokTik or something?
In Italian we say “blu” for the English “dark blue” and “celeste” or “azzurro for the English “light blue”, in fact they are two distinct colors for us.
I am not sure, but I suspect it is similar for other Latin-derived languages.
yeah in Spanish we have Azul and Celeste😊
There also is the mineral celestine that has a light blue hue
Thank you for a great lecture on this!
Light blue is cyan (🩵), totally another color different from blue (💙)
Similarly, for English speakers, red and pink are distinct colours, but in many cultures and languages, they are shades of the same colour. The same can be said of orange and yellow. In most European cultures, orange has only been used to describe a colour for a few centuries.
To put it another way, _all_ colour names that you use in everyday life are umbrella terms. Green is green until we need to distinguish lime green and emerald green, in which case languages tend to pick the easiest visual reference. The coolest revelation for me though was that basic colour words are not like objects you can point to, they're fuzzy ranges with artificial boundaries that vary between cultures. The rainbow could have 2 colours, or 6, or 10, or 20 depending on how many times you think it's important to split it
Artistically and linguistically, yes ... but biologically, there are only three colours (if you're human): red, green, and blue. It gets a lot more complicated for a lot of other creatures, like goldfish IIRC.
I adore finding a channel that will grow to millions of subs as it begins.
Solid work
Oh what the fuck this only has 10k views lol, her delivery is awesome! I love her voice
In my language, Polish, dark blue is called "granat". It's the same word as name garnet gem (who is red) and pomegranate fruit (also red), and grenade explosive (usually not red). In history Poland imported indigo blue pygment from India and thus was packed crushed to small pebble-like particles. This fraction was called "pomme-granate blue" and this name was shortened to "granat". Name of one from types pygment later become a name of colour.
Interesting, I always wondered this
fascynujące 😊
Bizarrely in modern greek they use a variation on the germanic word μπλε or blé (said like the french word for wheat) but in ancient greek they used a word closer to cyan
Good job I don't know much Greek, or I'd fall into another rabbit hole over that. 😉 Now I must find a Greek professor and ask... 🤪😄
Literally the entire germanic language family does this
Not to mention French
@@hellbooks3024 And Catalan
Add Italian too...
the point
you
@@hellbooks3024Allez Les Bleus!
Filipinos use “azul” from Spanish too! We also use Bughaw as another blue name
same in brazil!! in portuguese we also say azul! pretty interesting
I thinks it's Asul not Azul also I would like that Arabs use Azraq for blue interestingly
In India, blue is called 'Neel' that comes from 'Neela'. Neela is the Sanskrit word for Blue Sapphire, which is a highly precious and potent gemstone found in India and Sri Lanka. Look it up, it's spectacular 🧿
Benitoite
That’s interesting, in Persian we use terms like "nīlī" and "nīlgūn" (nīl-like), and it is of course a variant of blue. I always understood nīlī as indigo but at least according to the Persian Wikipedia it’s "curelean" blue. There are a couple of proposed etymologies for the word nīl. The majority of linguists believe it comes from Middle Persian Nīl (indigo), but others consider it related to the name of the river Nile as it’s also pronounced as "nīl" in Persian, so according to them nīlī literally means "Nile-like". But I suspect it being a cognate of your "neel" or it being ultimately a borrowing makes more sense.
In Czech, blue is modrý, modrá, modř etc. depending on the context.
And interestingly, a bruise is called "modřina", so you can see the connection there too 😁
Is the modrá, modr, modry (sorry, my phone doesn't do the other accents) a matter of grammar, perhaps? I think it was a Czech speaker who mentioned that the endings for the color words change when you say "blue-and-white stripes" (on a T-shirt) vs "white-and-blue stripes". 🤔🤷
@@thekingsdaughter4233 Yes! In Czech, words change forms depending on the grammatical context: modrý, modrá, modré, modrou, modrého, modrými, modrému (and many more) are all various forms of the same adjective. Modř is a noun but this particular form is quite bookish (or you could say poetic). The blue-and-white vs. white-and-blue is modrobílá vs. bělomodrá.
In Slovenian language blue is also modra (barva). To be "moder" also means to be wise.
In other exYu countries (Croatia, Serbia, Bosinia, etc.) it's plava and sometimes also modra (boja).
@@DusanPavlicek78 Changes if you inflect the word, otherwise it has only one indefinite form.
@@YouBazinga Modrá barva - same as in Czech 🙂Wise is moudrý in Czech -- pretty close. Thanks for the info! 👍
Ms. Violet Beauregard teaching us about the color blue.
Give this woman her own show I could watch this about all the colours !!! Brilliant stuff 👏
interesting how in Català we use the same word as the Old Germanic "Blau" and it's pronounced the same way as well
Since it derived from bright in different languages it stands for white, like "biały"
Because catalan is a Gallo-Romance language that has been influenced by the germanic Franks while it was still Occitan in France.
Som el poti-poti europeu
Blakytny in Ukrainian, never thought the root, bla- is Germanic.
This is incredible! You are amazing ❤
This is absolutely fascinating, I'm so pleased I've found your content! Looking forward to the next colour
thank you!!
The French association with bleu unfortunately clouds that both blãw in Old English and blå/Blau in other Germanic languages, come from blēwaz in Proto Germanic. It seems reasonable that blue in English is not blue because of French, but in fact, despite French.
that become 'blow' in english but she is right it entered through middle french not old English
One of the things which threw me when learning Russian was the use of two blues and two words for what we would have one. Dark blue and light blue are different colours.
Totally makes sense - think of 2 other word pairs: red/pink, green/ lime to distinguish the darker and the lighter shade. The video is about a missing word in English, that should form a similar pair.
As a result, people imagine a different shade of blue when speaking different languages...
Came over from your insta SSG, reckon this vid is your breakthrough moment, brill content too keep it up 🔥
that is so nice! thank you!
Superb! This was a marvellous video, the aesthetics, the atmosphere, the quality, the incredible pronunciation of the host in the different languages…this video in TH-cam it’s definitely a tiny piece of gold in between the mud of the “mine”. Thank you for being generous with the quality and dedication! We need more things like this in the world
And on top of all that it gives your armor special properties 😮
your voice is panned all the way to the left, you might wanna put it in mono.
I always edit without headphones on so thank you!!!! I had no idea 🙃
@@sophiasg I think you might also still have the in-camera audio hanging out on the right channel too, it's just obviously much fainter and echoed
@@sophiasg yeah please fix for the future - was difficult to listen with headphones...
@@sophiasg Awesome video! But yeah definitely Chuck some headphones on when editing, there were a lot of dips and peaks. Visuals and cuts are seamless though, really professional work.
This was such a wonderful watch, Sophia. I feel cultured and as if I've transcended (hello that music?)
thank you so much. that means a lot coming from you!!!!!!
This will be my second time through, it is that good. I watched before on my phone, and now I'm subscribed.
Nice touch with the blue nail polish…
Interesting video! I do love learning about word origins and proto-Indoeuropean stuff. I have often wondered about the blue/azure split.
It's also great to see the part about using it in paintings. To us today that's just a nice blue mantle but with the context of how much it cost, it takes on a whole new meaning.
Solidly handled educational content on the linguistic origin of the word and concept of 'Blue'. Nicely handle.
I look forward to more colorful installments in this series.
Here is how I got here. Just got into fountain pens, looking for the most pure blue ink, found a video about Lapis Lazuli being turned into fine inks, now you. Couldn’t be happier how the algorithm got me here. Have you done one on Phoenician Purple? Originally the dye came from processing predatory sea snails from Carthage. This is the first video of yours I’ve seen, excited to see what else is here.
Sodalite
One of the main ingridients of this mineral is pure oxygen .
@@josephmedina6403 wow I had no idea thank you so much!
This video is so epic and well done. Please continue this series.
According to Newton’s roygbiv, blue is what we call cyan. Indigo is what we call blue.
Yeah, the last three I'd call aqua, blue, purple.
Thank you YT algo for finding this video and creator. Excellent video.
This just a tangent on the subject but long ago we called black men like African "Blue men" or in our language (Swedish) "blåmän" or "blaman" which adds to the confusion of blue I guess. In old nordic it was blámaðr. Afrika was called : "Blåland".
In Irish they say "purple people."
What kind of Tom Scott is this?
A blue one. No red shirt here.
Glas - blue or (in older Welsh) green.
Presumably then also in brythonic. I'm surprised you didn't mention this, as it means the concept of blue as a distinct colour was brought to Britain by the Germanic tribes and wasn't previously here.
In Ancient Greek the name of the colour blue is _κυανόν_ /ky.anón/ (n.) which comes from the adjective _κύανος_ /ký.anοs/ = *enamel, lapis lazuli, blue copper carbonate* which has an unclear etymology. It could be either a loanword from Hittite, _kuu̯anna(n)-_ = *blue as copper* (likely), or an original IE word from PIE *ḱwn̥Ho- (unlikely).
Since the Byzantine era, the name _κυανόν_ has come to describe the *dark blue colour* which explains why in Modern Greek we borrowed from French the word _μπλε_ /ble/ (n. indeclinable) for *blue*
I like how Sophia went all the way to wear blue jacket, blue hair band and even blue nail polish to honour the colour blue!
"Why do two different languages have two different words for the same thing?"
? Such elevated production values at the start of a channel can only mean good things for the future. Subbed.
Brillant explanations! Thank you so much! I‘m looking foreward to more excellent clips from your channel! Greetings from Switzerland
This video was very engaging and an impressive début.
One minor technical point, however: it seems like through most of the video, your audio is coming predominantly through the left speaker and, worse, when you’re talking with Dr Russell, she appears onscreen at the left and you’re on the right but her audio is coming predominantly from the _right_ and yours from the _left._ The mismatch is a little disorienting. Probably when you’re onscreen alone and certainly in voiceovers, it’s better if your voice is at the center (i.e., both left and right audio equally balanced) and, if you’re onscreen with someone else, it’s better if the audio locations are not mismatched with the ones onscreen-they can be centered, too, or, be slightly oriented to the onscreen locations. (Even later when the audio matches Dr Russell’s onscreen location 6:51 it’s almost _too_ heavily weighted to that side.)
OK, if all your vids are as good as this I have ro subscribe.🎉
thank you so much :D I'm working on episodes for the other colours now!
For some reason, all I can add is my mind went to Percy in Blackadder II and his "nugget of purest green..." I like the artist paint tubes my friends buy for their painting. They have fantastic and varied names from the romance language palette 🎨
I loved the learning and the interviews. It's interesting learning about ultramarine and lapis lazuli, but I found the stereo mixing between the speakers during interviews and the main speaker being balanced to one side to be very distracting from the main content. It's a small nitpick, but one that can easily be fixed during editing in future videos.
Meanwhile non-Romance languages: Are you kidding?
(Polish: niebieski, błękitny, granatowy, modry; Russian: синый, голубой; Hungarian: kék; to show some European languages)
Good job with the Mandarin word "qing". You even got the tone correct.
thank you, I tried really hard to get it as right as I can. I always look up pronunciations before filming. I also did a year of Mandarin a million years ago where I got to practice tones.
Well, in Mandarin Chinese, 青 which Sophia mentioned before means both "blue" and "green" (more precisely "light green"). But, nowadays, many Chinese speakers say blue as "藍 (lán)". That's my explanation.....
@@erdyantodwinugrohozheng Yep. Lan is blue and lu is green. When I was in school, qing was always green-blue.
There's a reason one of the popular shades of blue in English is royal blue.
interesting but in my op. there are some imprecisions: in Italian azzurro and blu are separate colours - even if they are both interpreted as "blu". Also "blue as the colour of transcendency" I am not really sure (not sure blue is "calming" either). Colours have different meanings in different cultures: in Egypt/Babylon blue was associated with divinity, yes! In other cultures together with white was linked to the dead. The colour associated with divinity in China is yellow and for the greeks or the romans the divine colour is purple - and purple for us is not what purple is for germanic peoples, we clearly distinguish violet and purple. Also all colours are determined by how the light interacts with the surface, not just blue.
I liked your video very much. Well done. I am colour blind so I understand why differentiating colours is not always easy and done on a need-to basis.
Maybe I would like to see you do a video on how we perceive colours and how is it we can see pink and brown, colours not present in the rainbow spectrum.
i realize now that you are more into the language part, so I suggest you do something on the colour pink and how it is identified in various languages
We say plav/a/o in Serbian but we also have an added descriptor for a shade of tropical sea blue, azuran/rna/rno.
Fascinating overview and etymology 😊❤
Great video - nice work. 👍🏻
What a lovely linguistic, history amd art lesson rolled into one😊
Your voice is awesome. Great video!
While it getting to be somewhat of a lost art most combination colors can be mixed. Paint stores could mix them by hand but is now done computer by a premixed formula. My sign painter father said he could mix any color except purple and some shades of Royal blue, if he could find the right base color.
Regarding green v.s. blue, In Japan, we call the green traffic light 'blue'.
Granny Smith apple is called the blue apple (青リンゴ). We also call unripe fruits on the tree as blue.
Furthermore, most of us Japanese are born with a Mongolian blue spot on our bottom or lower backside, which disappears in about 5 years. So, when we see an immature person, we say "he is still blue bottomed".
The green on newer traffic lights often looks blue to me. I suppose it's where on the spectrum you draw the line.
In 1Q84 there's a character called Aomame, as in "green peas", but if you Googled it you'd find that "ao" actually means blue. So I guess this explains it.
Super cool video, I always wondered about why English was unique in this sense! Only a small thing, I think it would probably be better if you recorded voices mono and not stereo. It's kind of distracting to have voices come from the left or the right all of a sudden depending on the mic's position.
Never subbed a new channel faster.
Hello, Sophia. "Blue" in Indonesian is "Biru" which originally comes from "(ma-)biʀaw" in Proto-Malayo-Polynesian and in Proto-Malayic called "biru". And also found in Malaysian Malay and Bruneian Malay.
Although some Austronesian languages turned "(ma-)biʀaw" which means "blue" into "biru" or "bilu", some are pronounced differently. For examples: in Tagalog/Filipino called "bughaw" and Makasar is called "gaw'" which is a cognate of the Tagalog word "bughaw". So, that's my explanation.....
That was fascinating!
Just started the vid but in modern Vietnamese, “xanh” can be used for either blue or green. Green is normally specified as “xanh lá cây”. Basically “tree leaf xanh”.
In Latvia we call it "zils" 🔵
Instant subscribe! thank you
In Ukrainian it's "синій" (syni) for navy "блакитний" (blakytny) similar root to Germanic blau for azure, our flag is coded as the darker blue. We learn that rainbow has 7 colors, in English they translate to: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, blue, violet. ONE IS MISSING. You call it Indigo, but indigo also exists as separate color (індіго) in Slavic tongues anyway.
SO yes, English IS missing a full color, same way Chinese was grouping green and blue together, English is still grouping two different colors that are called just blue, which, BTW, debunks the weird idea that "ancients didn't see blue/green", they just didn't have extra separate word as many languages still don't for fuschia, magenta, cyan whatever, and how orange is borrowed word for most (hence, redheads, not orange-heads).
The same with the Turkic languages. We up until recently in historical scale called both the green and the blue color "kok" and later reflecting to the worldwide demond of distinguishing the two we started using "green" as yashyl, and "blue" as "kok"
Ya I like this and the fit is fire
I really enjoy this show and you remind me of the girl who says "I want an Ooompa Loompah now" in Willy Wonka.Thats one of the things I like about you
lol
good pronunciation of Arabic and Persian words
Right?! I suspect they studied extensively.
@@OctopusOwlmy undergraduate degree is in Spanish and Arabic :)
Hi. Thank You very much for that nice video. It was very informative and very professional. The audio is good (even if a bit unbalanced). The music from 4:47 on stunned me, What is the name of that piece of music?
I am pretty sure that Italians do not use "azurro" for blue. Blue and azurc is as different to them as red and pink is to English speakers. Spanish azul appears more as an outller rather than the English blue.
I'm red-green colour blind, and blue is one of the few colours I can see properly. There are shades of red and green which I get confused, but blue is never in doubt. Blue stands out for me in anything I see, whereas most other colours are various shades of muddiness
In Slovene we have Plava related to Blau/Blue which may also mean fair or light colour as in blond hair, fair sky.
Another is Modra which the orogin is related to water and deoths of it, but is most commonly used, also used for "wise". If someone is wise they are "blue" also "that is a blue thought.", "you speak blueness. "
Last one I know is sinji, which means bright and shining, mostly for light blues, sky, eyes.
Another I found but havent heard in use anymore is Višnjev, literally "sour cherry coloured" Most probably because sour cherries stain skin and cloth blue.
nice treat for your left ear.
Great video; very interesting - well done 👍
Then there is turquoise; which will appear more green or more blue depending upon the individual. Some will discern the demarcation point at slightly different frequency than others.
"Why do we call blue 'blue' in English?"
Good question. Too bad this video doesn't answer this question at all. No mentioning of the etymology of the word blue, it's use in Germanic languages and why there's no distinction between light and dark blue in this language family.
In art school, there is a palette color called "azure", a greenish somewhat paler blue than the lazuli/pthalo blue
Azurite is the mineral source of 'Azure'.
Lapis Lazuli is the mineral rock that natural Ultramarine Blue is processed from. This process involves a complicated sifting levigation and lengthy beeswax extraction refinement for the purest/brightest grades. Ash blue is the rawer less refined form.
Synthetic ultramarine is the ultramarine found in most artist colour ranges now.
Thalo/ Pthalo blue is Pthalocyanine blue. With several grades as well as a green & nominally turquoise form.
'Monestial/Monastral blue- other names for Pthalocyanine blue.
@@rickh3714 thank you. I appreciate all the details.
Hearing that English blue comes from an older root that effectively means "bright" is so funny when you take into account that the Norse cognate, blár, which gave rise to the modern words for blue in the Scandinavian languages (blå), used to basically mean "dark blue, black, a dark color", and Norse sea travelers referred to dark-skinned North Africans as "blámaðr" (literally "blue-man"). Funny how the same root diverged in meaning, but somehow ended up meaning basically the same thing! (Modern Scandinavian languages, like English, do not have distinct words for light and dark blue in everyday language, unlike Romance languages.)
Gorrym in Manx Gaelic. (And similar I'm sure in Scottish and Irish Gaelic)
When you were standing in front of "The Virgin and Child Embracing" it struck me that you, young woman .. would not be out of place in a Vermeer painting. The "Girl with a Pearl Earring" comes to mind.
Actually I call it green, color history joke. I recently found out other cultures didn't even have a word to distinguish blue and green for the longest time.
My left ear loved this video
same
In other languages it's also blue. Possibly related also to English blee (“colour”), from Old English blēo (“colour”);Wikitionary Writes that origin root comes from and Proto-Germanic *hiwją (“colour, hue”) and this one came from the root *kew-, *ḱew- (“skin, cuticle, hide; beauty, splendour”) or from Proto-Indo-European *ḱyeh₁- (“grey, dark shade”) . In Russia is more interesting but just similar the word "golubetz" sounds almost same as pigeon , has the same root and at first had three meanings color from grey to blue , a box with gems , and a lake with saint water under or near the church. So blue at first was not blue at all but it might be grey , skin- grey or even purple as skin in cold , and interesting that the word Greek also had came from the word grey
Funnily enough we describe our optical colour sensors - the "cones" in the retina of the eye having sensitivity in the red, green and blue parts of the spectrum of white light. In fact the Red cones have 2 sensitivity peaks in the red and violet parts of the spectrum. The overwhelming light that we get is actually sky blue, or the light from the sky which varies in colour during the day from very dark blue-black when the sky lightens before dawn to the vibrant light blue of a cloudless summers day. This is caused by scattering of light by the molecules in the atmosphere. There are other light sensors in the eye, the "rods", whose peak sensitivity is between sky blue, and blue-green (duck-egg blue, or cyan). These cells act as comparators of brightness and act from the brightest daytime to help distinguish objects in the shadows (indirectly illuminated by reflections of the sky), and when light conditions are changing after the sun goes down, when there is little colour information received by the eye.
Azure is a subset of blue. It is aka sky-blue.
I used to work in lasers and one we made was purple. My physicist boss liked to tell us "There is no purple laser. The color is violet".
You can still buy genuine ultramarine blue paint BUT it is about £100 for 40 ml
The ancient Picts painted their bodies blue to radiate calm and peacefulness.
*From Middle English blewe, from Anglo-Norman blew (“blue”),[1] from Middle French bleu, from Old French blöe, bleve, blef (“blue”), from Frankish *blāu (“blue”) (perhaps through a Late Latin blāvus, blāvius (“blue”) attested from Isidore of Seville), from Proto-Germanic *blēwaz (“blue, dark blue”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰlēw- (“yellow, blond, grey”). Cognate with dialectal English blow (“blue”), Scots blue, blew (“blue”), North Frisian bla, blö (“blue”), Saterland Frisian blau (“blue”), Dutch blauw (“blue”), German blau (“blue”), Danish, Norwegian and Swedish blå (“blue”), Icelandic blár (“blue")*
I am learning Scottish Gaelic, and as an Italian, I was confused by GORM meaning both green and blue. Now I know why!
In Thai we called light blue, "Fah"(meaning Sky) and we called darker blue as "Nam Ngeon"(meaning Silver Liquid) Also the words for blues are very recent. As many elders still called em green (which covered the shades in between emerald to indigo)
In the Netherlands and other Dutch speaking countries we called blue "blauw"
2:38 I mean. But that is surprising. Because we didn't know that until much later after the color was named. You can't apply evidence backwards like that lol
great video ❤️
In Spanish we call it Azul, light blue would be Celeste/Azul Claro and dark blue would be Azul Oscuro/Marino. I guess the word Lapislazuli makes more sense now 😅🔵
this reasoning that it appears rarely in nature is kind of silly. The entire sky, sea, lakes are blue. You can stand on a beach, look out to sea and see nothing but blue.
*cyan* is a mixture of green and blue...
Interesting video
English: Blue
Spanish: Azul
French: Azur
French cows: SHAZUL!
So what is the Gaelic word for blue There are more than just a few English phrases to denote how we share that color with our children.
My left ear heard you very clearly.
In other languages? German: Blau. Irish: Gorm. Swedish: Blå. Welsh: Glas. Scots Gaelic: Gorm. So, why, exactly would you expect our name for the color to be based an azure?
You should have a history channel show. Except history channel circa 2000 because it blows in recent years...so maybe a Nebula or Wondrium show