(E)very language has a small determinate set of basic color terms... supplemented by an open-ended class of more subtle terms. Hence modern English has black white, red, brown…while, for example, crimson, vermilion, scarlet, and pink can be seen as kinds of red.From Ad Infinitum; a Biography of Latin, by Nicholas Ostler (Walker and Company, 2007), p. 307-8. (Other excerpts from this interesting book here).
The set of basic terms differs among languages; to take one famous example, Japanese ao covers the space shared between blue and green, and some languages may have as few as two basic terms.
Evidently too the set can change over time: orange and purple were not even color words in Anglo-Saxon or Old French…
Aristotle himself had, in fact, only distinguished three colors in the rainbow: red, green, and purple…
09 May 2009
How many colors in a rainbow?