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Languages, words for colours, blue/green | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5465 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 9 of 20 21 May 2010 at 7:53am | IP Logged | ||
Yeah, Russian uses goluboi (sorry no Cyrillic) for cyan and sinii for blue. Incidentally, goluboi is also the Russian word for "gay" so be careful how you use it! This is also true of Japanese (not the gay part) where aoi means blue and mizuiro is used for cyan (literally "water colour"). In both languages you will be corrected by a native speaker if you describe something English-speakers consider to be light blue as "blue". Another interesting colour factlet about Japan is that Japanese people automatically consider cars to be white in a general sense. When I taught English I used to have my students list objects of different colours on the blackboard as a kind of relay race, and under "white" someone always wrote "car". Apparently until recently almost all private cars in Japan were white. This is certainly not true anymore, but obviously car=white has remained in people's consciousness. Edited by TixhiiDon on 21 May 2010 at 7:54am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6769 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 10 of 20 21 May 2010 at 2:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I like how when Japanese children draw the sun, it is always red. In Canada and presumably other Anglo-Saxon
countries, the sun will always be yellow. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kidshomestunner Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6406 days ago 239 posts - 285 votes Speaks: Japanese | Message 11 of 20 21 May 2010 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | ||
But Cyan is hardly ever used in English: Midori and Aoi are frequently used in Japanese. The world color survey is always interesting for me from a semantic POV ao is for vegetables and the like midori is for other things. Midori is not a shade of aoi ANYMORE. As most of us I am sure know the katakana garaigo for green is sometimes used. I think that it was after WW2 that the differences started happening??? Edited by kidshomestunner on 21 May 2010 at 4:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| DaisyMaisy Senior Member United States Joined 5381 days ago 115 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 12 of 20 21 May 2010 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have always wondered at the expression (or perhaps it was a book title?), "sailing the wine dark sea". Do they mean the sea is a dark purple? Or just that it's dark?
@ pohaku: I agree, the ocean can be some many different colors. Makes me think of the term "sea foam green", which I've always thought was a great name for that particular shade of green. English has terms like "sky blue", "snow white", "blood red", etc. I expect other languages have descriptive terms like these, though I don't know of any offhand. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5448 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 13 of 20 21 May 2010 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | ||
The other day, I ran across an article about a cognitive scientist who thinks that the way we experience the world through the categories imposed by our language doesn't just affect how we express ourselves, it affects the things we notice and pay attention to.
(link: http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2010/mayjun/feat ures/boroditsky.html) I like to talk to myself in languages that I'm studying as a way to keep in touch with it. When I do this with Breton, it always feels strange because the grass is "glas," the leaves are "glas," the sky is "glas" and the water in the reservoir is "glas." In other cases, one works at a language to better understand its finer distinctions. But with something like this, before you can start to understand the distinctions your target language makes, you have to learn to let go of the distinctions your own language makes. And based on the excerpt, there's a real question of whether, even if you master the language perfectly, you can actually experience the world truly and fully through your target language - at least the way a native speaker would. What starts out, at first blush, as a vocabulary curiosity, holds within it the root of one of the biggest challenges we face as language learners - feeling distinctions that we weren't raised to make. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| BudBrown Diglot Newbie United States budbrownonline.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5710 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog, Vietnamese | Message 14 of 20 21 May 2010 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is a fascinating topic. The Vietnamese do distinguish green and blue by adding
another sound to xanh GREEN = xanh la cay (la cay = leaf) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5348 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 15 of 20 21 May 2010 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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For Italians who start to learn English it is somewhat baffling to have to use only one word (blue) to describe what for us are two different colours: ‘blu’ (dark blue) and ‘azzurro’ (light blue). Moreover, we commonly split what the English see as just blue into three colours: ‘blu’ is dark, ‘azzurro’ is bright and ‘celeste’ is light and has less saturation. Anyway it is conceptually easier for us to bundle together ‘azzurro’ and ‘celeste’ and make do with just one term for both (like ‘light blue’ in English) than bundling together ‘azzurro’ and ‘blu’ (in the English word ‘blue’).
5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| BiaHuda Triglot Groupie Vietnam Joined 5364 days ago 97 posts - 127 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Vietnamese Studies: Cantonese | Message 16 of 20 23 May 2010 at 5:28am | IP Logged | ||
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It is true that Vietnamese don't distinguish between Blue and Green often, i.e. tra xang (green tea). They do have a way of itentifying these two clolours however, mau xang nouc bien is literally "the colour sea blue" or the coluour normally associated with blue, whereas mau xang la cay is the colour of a green leaf or green.
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