Floyd,
Thanks. On the off chance that this might be of interest, see below.
Win
You often see the colors of the spectrum listed as ROYGBIV: Red Orange
Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet. Ever wonder how Indigo snuck its way
in there, together with the three primary and three secondary pigment
colors? It made the list because Sir Isaac wanted there to be exactly
7 colors, for numerological reasons.
An even more interesting followup question: why indigo, specifically?
If you were trying to shoehorn a seventh color into the visible spectrum,
wouldn't you pick the hole between green and blue, say, instead of the
one between blue and violet? The number of existing color words in the
aqua/turquoise/teal/cerulean range certainly suggests it's a much more
perceptible gap.
Well, this turns out to lead us into deep blue waters. Color words are
wondrous in their ability to shift value over the centuries: consider
Homer's wine-dark sea, or the repeated description of Sirius (the same
star we call Sirius, no possible mistake) as RED in Egyptian papyri.
(By the way, the white dwarf companion of Sirius is believed to be at
least a couple of million years old, so nice try. More elaborate
theories involving the Moties, Howard Grote Littlemead, and the Church
of Him may be viable, though....)
Anyway, in Newton's day it appears that the word "blue" meant a range
from sky-blue to aquamarine, but _not_ the colors we today call royal
or midnight or navy blue. Those colors didn't really have a name, and
Newton, stumped for a word to describe the region of the spectrum
between aqua and violet, coined "indigo", after the New World dye that
would make that shade the canonical "blue" by the end of the 18c. So
in fact Newton _did_ put in a color between green and (our) blue,
namely (his) blue. And that left a gap near our blue, for which he
had an apt, but now superfluous, new word.
Just to belabor the philological point, here is a brief essay on the
word-roots "yellow" and "black", excerpted from a marvelous little
Anglo-Saxon vocabulary entitled _Word-Hoard_ (Stephen A. Barney, Yale).
gold (n.) "GOLD"; gylden (adj.) "GOLDEN"; geolo (adj.) "YELLOW".
Related to "gold" also is the OE "gealla" GALL, the yellow humour.
Cognate are Lat. "fel", gall; ModG "Geld", money; "gelb", yellow.
In Beowulf, geolo refers to the color of linden-wood, the material
of shields. The terms for colors in OE are confusing to us
because the OE spectrum of hues was not divided in quite the same
way (e.g., their "red" leaned toward the yellow -- but see our terms
like "crimson, scarlet, claret, burgundy, velvet, mauve, lavender,
violet, heliotrope, fuschia, flamingo, peach, pink, beige"). Even
more confusing are the numbers of OE color terms which denote, not
hue (wavelength), but chroma (reflectivity, brightness, quantity
of light) or intensity (purity, admixture of white or black,
lightness or darkness). ModE also preserves, from OE, the words
"dun, wan, sallow, fallow, bleak, dusky, swarthy, bright, light,
murky, dark, black, gray, white," etc. (as well as words like
"livid, fulvous, sorrel, roan, tawny, pallid, tan, bay, buff, pale"
from Romance langs.) to refer to "colors" which are not strictly
hues. Most speakers would consider this set of words rather
difficult to define, because we are not accustomed to thinking
of color except as hue, in spite of the rather large non-hue
resources of our own vocabulary. Adding to the confusion are OE
terms which then referred to chroma (e.g., brUn and hwIt, meaning
"bright, shining," used of BURNished metal) whose reflexes now
(BROWN, WHITE) refer to hue or intensity. The group of OE,
Romance, and ModE words connected with "black", for instance,
has not yet been straightened out (OE blaec, blAc, blac, blIcan,
blAEcu, BLACK, BLIK, BLINK, BLAKE, BLEAK, BLEACH, BLOKE, BLANK,
BLANC, etc.): they seem to refer to "black, white, pale, dark,
shiny," like the colorless all-color of Moby Dick.
What we need to find is a pre-Christian Rosetta tablet with Pantone
numbers.
Joshua W. Burton <jburton@nwu.edu> |
