My fault. And it’s complicated. I usually, when finished with a book, email it to my editor/publisher. But she happened to be in the middle of the Atlantic ocean when I finished, on a boat, and I was not so sure about e-mails. So I waited. And started the next book.
The cover artist contacted me through Betsy some months back asking for info on the book—perfectly ordinary—so I answered him. Gave him details. He’s working on the cover.
Yesterday Betsy asked me when I was going to turn this book in, and turns out she was talking about the LAST book, not the one I’m about to finish. I had never sent the book.
So it’s totally my fault that we are late, late, late. It looks as if the next book will slot for January 2020.
Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
Okay. Only um… 8 or 9 months to wait then. :O
I can do this, I can do this…
Might require a reread of the entire series just to refresh my memory though. Not… not that I really need it, having read them umpteen times already…
@CJ, How effusive were Romans and Greeks over colors? Did they have word distinctions for shades of color, say creamy yellow, vs butter yellow, vs lemon yellow?
Not sure about the Romans, but archaeologists have dug up painted Greek statues. From traces of paint, they apparently favored wild color schemes.
It’s the modern reconstructionists who favor wild color schemes. The available evidence shows that the ancients often favored subtle colors.
This video shows the best reconstruction of color on an ancient statue that I’ve seen. It shows translucent colors and realistic skin tones. It’s a painstaking reconstruction after extensive scientific analysis. Skip to near the end of the video to see the final result.
Compare that reconstruction with this crude one of the same statue.
Did English have terms for subtle shades of color before the mid-20th century? Very few, I think.
It was the rise of modern chemical paints and dyes that allowed such subtle distinctions. And computer monitors with 16 million colors. Before that, there was little need for such specific terminology.
Another point – and this is interesting – is that different languages have different approaches to naming colors. Different languages divide up color-space differently.
Experts in ancient Greek have been debating for centuries exactly what Homer meant by οἶνοψ πόντος (oinops pontos) – usually translated in English as ‘wine-dark sea’. The short answer is that nobody knows. The only other time Homer uses the term οἶνοψ, he applies it cattle.
http://www.elizabethancostume.net/lizcolor.html
Interesting! A lot more names than I thought. Most of them seem to refer to the color of a some object, flower or animal, or dyes produced in certain cities. ‘Gooseturd green’ – no marketing consultants in the 16th century!
“Dead Spaniard”?
I understand color terminology is cultural. I believe ometime in the past green and blue were named the same. But I an thinking of flowers. They’ve always had a variety of hues and tints. In rhododendrons we have a luteum which is pretty much eggyolk yellow and lutescens with is more butter yellow. I recognize the lute root from many yellowish things. I’ve got some Iris tenax to name.
I think they would simply say, ‘The color of such-and-such flower’ – which is not very helpful if you want to do it the other way round. 🙂
It’s not only in the past that there was one word for the green-blue range (or ‘grue’ as people studying color and language like to call it in English). Over half of all languages today have a word for ‘grue’. It’s not a case of ‘more developed’ or ‘less developed’ languages at all. Japanese and Koreans think of the three colors of a traffic light as red, yellow, and ‘blue’.
Some languages have different basic color words for yellowish-greens and blueish-greens, or for the range ‘dark-blue to blue-gray to gray’ or for the range ‘purple to dark brown’ or ‘dark brown to dark gray’. Russian and Greek speakers do not consider light blue and dark blue to be different shades of the same color, but completely different colors, as different as orange and red for English speakers.
Some languages also take into account luminescence, saturation, warmth, or other attributes when naming colors. Even such factors as emotional connotations, context, whether a natural or artificial color, can be taken into account in color names. To understand the Hungarian terms for different reds, it helps to be Hungarian!
A quick overview of some color terms in different languages.
Interesting article, GreenWyvern. Interesting, too, that you put a color term in your name.
American stoplights have a lot of blue in what most of us take as green for men with common red-green color-blindness.
I suppose I could go through by rhody books and see what taxonomists have chosen when naming various species by a predominant color. They use Latin or “Latinized” words. I know they use two words for reds, “rosea” and “rufus/rufrum”.
See The Color Terms of Botanical Latin
They have 31 terms for different shades of red. Or you can simply make up your own. The color of… something. Then find the word for the ‘something’ in Latin.
Thanks, that’s what I need. I do take his meaning that botanical terms have been “adapted” from Latin.
I wonder if there are acceptable prefixes or suffixes that would suggest a modicum of “more of” or “less of”? I’m thinking of a definitely light purple, true purple in hue. I wouldn’t want to lead one astray by using a comparison to lilac, which is in that list.
I gather the “-um” suffix I see in rhododendron botanical names means affinity or resemblance as we might use “-like”?
Murexius? Murexium?
Muregina?
I can’t make sense of what you’re suggesting. I understand Murex is the source for Tyrian purple, but from the examples I’ve seen it’s much too red and dark. Now, intensity can be controlled by how long the cloth is in the dye vat, but in naming I’d still need a modifier signifying “light”, or maybe “pale”.
I have seen occasional (clearly older) incandescent-based traffic signals wherein the glass of the green lens had faded to a more yellowish-green. They of course do not remain long in this state, getting replaced for the reason you state. LED signals won’t have that issue — but have issues of their own. Although there is a move towards national standardizing of signal arrangement, so that fully colorblind folks can intuit color by position alone. This has meant the horizontally-oriented traffic signals that were almost unique to Milwaukee are going away in favor of standard-required vertical arrangement. And elements of a unit must be in one line, no having a solid red centered atop paired solid and arrow signals like Michigan (and some other places) favors.
Being springish, one of my little cactuses decided to bloom – not its first time, as there was the remains of one flower in the pot, from last spring, when I got it a few months ago.
Today was the day they were open and glorious: orangeish red going to deep rose pink, almost a deep magenta, and white throat crossed by deep-rose-pink stems on the stamens. The flowers were almost too big for the plant to carry.
(I took pictures, but couldn’t get them at their most open, as the camera decided it needed charging.)
English and other Germanic languages inherited the old Common Germanic words for blue and green, so even during Roman times, the tribes that would become the various Goths (Visigoths, Ostrogoths, etc.) and the Scandinavians (Old Norse (modern Norwegian and Swedish), Danish, Viking raiders, Icelanders, etc.), and the Western Germanic branch (English, Friesian, Dutch, High and Low German) — all inherited the older forms we now have in English as green and blue; also grey/gray, and the other common English color-names except pink, purple/violet, and orange.
The Old English (Anglo-Saxons) did not have a common word we know of for “orange,” but instead called it the OE equivalent of “yellow-red.” If memory serves, gealuræd. I may have the vowel wrong for red, which apparently could vary some over the English countryside from “rad” to “ræd” to “red” to “reed” or “reid,” and where that double ee was, back then, a longer ay/eh sound, é. It wasn’t until oranges came to Europe from the Middle East and further east, that medieval Europeans went wild for the fruit and the color and had a color-name so popular that it took over most Western European languages, “orange.” (And I’m unclear whether the House of Orange is a linguistic coincidence or more mania for oranges.)
But worldwide, people do perceive colors and the boundaries between one color and another differently. — I used to have very good color perception, but with my vision problems, my color perception has lessened, sometimes to a baffling degree. Colors between cyan and green, and between orange and magenta (hot pink) can be harder for me to distinguish now. This means that browns and purples can now look too similar at times for me, which is very, very weird. (They’re basically dark versions of orange and magenta.) If and when I get cataract surgery, this may clear this up some, but I have heard always that color perception changes after cataract surgery, because the artificial lens implants and the biological natural lenses we’re born with have different color absorption properties, to things like UV light and others, for example.
There are a couple of great color-name videos that get into how various languages see color divisions, from the Vox channel on YouTube. I have run into them at least twice but forget to bookmark or download them, or I’d give links. — There has been research of current and past cultures to see what common patterns there are, as to how and why people divide up color names the ways they do. — I would guess that differences in diet or in genetic inheritance affect different people-groups’ perceptions of colors. Males and females tend to perceive color-ranges differently, and males are usually the ones to have any of several kinds of color-blindness, which are genetic, sex-linked (on the sex chromosomes.)
For older English color-names, many of our existing color-names go back to old traditional dyestuffs, flowers or other natural objects, and so on, as others above pointed out. — And English as usual has borrowed color terms from any language or place English speakers have gone. (And cross-pollination has meant that Asians have adapted traditional color names to be more specific and to be more common as distinctions, although the traditional distinctions (and lack of them) remain too.
So English has several words from (Norman) French and from modern French. Brunet (masculine) and Brunette (feminine) and Blond (m.) and Blonde (f.) got that confusing in English because English borrowed the words and then lost the distinction between masculine and feminine for the words’ usage in modern times, because English doesn’t make the distinction for other adjectives anymore. Before the 1950’s, people carefully distinguished these, usually. But by my generation, and certainly now, most people don’t unless they know French and why French does that. We also got beige and écru and taupe from the French. Oh, and mauve and puce. Both taupe and puce are really unflattering if you know the meaning of the words: taupe is the color of a mole’s fur, that faintly brownish, muddy grey. Poor fellows, they didn’t mean to give an unflattering name to a fashionable color. But it’s worse for puce. That’s the color of, ah, an engorged flea. No kidding. Or fleas generally. Yeah, it’s hard to look at the color word the same way after that, right? LOL.
I grew up with an artist for a mom, so I know the names of artist’s paint colors, particularly oil paints. I might not know some of the more obscure ones, but the great variety of cadmium from yellow pale to red deep, I know, and most others. I might have trouble identifying Van Dyk Brown and Payne’s Gray, but I’d likely get them right too.
So between language and art, I’ve always loved color.
I’d seen the one about the wine-dark sea and wondering why Homer applied a “wine” color to the deep blue-green of the sea. I had not remembered he’d also applied it to cattle. Presumably darkly colored cattle, though whether they were black or a very dark reddish color in his terms, I wonder. They had red ochre, yellow ochre, white clay, black clay and ivory and charcoal black, and natural grey clay, besides other colors from dyes and earths and pigments, including odd things like shells and squid and fungi, so they likely did have ways to describe a lot of fine distinctions of colors that haven’t survived with good descriptions.
From those 16th/17th century color-names, I would think that “verdigris” would be the same verdigris it has been since ancient times; that is, the grey-green of copper, bronze, and brass (alloys of copper) when it oxidizes. Compare photos of large copper or copper-alloy sculptures, such as the Statue of Liberty, various bells, various bronzes. The color-name verdigris dates to at least the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, and a dictionary etymology lookup may confirm it dates back to Greek and Roman times. Verdigris was used by ancient and medieval people as a painting pigment, although it was not a healthy choice. So there were at least a brighter and a duller, paler verdigris obtainable from the same pigment. This would have surely been known and used by the English and Scottish royal courts in Queen Elizabeth’s day and the century before, so that 1522 onward range would fit.
Motley, though, was a particular range of patterns, “dressed in motley,” often for court jesters (“fools”) or harlequins. Varying vertical stripes of alternating dark and light colors for a very recognizable costume to fit the courtly role of someone allowed to be humorous, satirical, mocking, etc., to keep the royals in a good mood, but also to remind them of, ah, better self-control and behavior. At least in theory. And potentially, though not nearly always, dwarfs / midgets. — But if there is evidence it was also some specific color, that would be really interesting.
“Biscaye” — While the color list says more information is needed to say what color it is, a first guess would be the Bay of Biscay, so some blue or green color, likely. But yes, without any description, it could be a dye produced in Biscaye, or people’s popular impression of something about Biscay.
Bottle Green in current times is a deep to translucent bluish-green color, more green than blue. But that doesn’t guarantee it was as dark as our current idea of the color is now. Interesting, though, that it would turn up in documents from around 1522.
Funny how many of those color-names refer to blushing and romantic or sexy colors. Pinks, skin tone variations, and so on. I guess courtly love was very preoccupying.
(One of my female cousins was very, VERY boy-crazy and smitten with a particular boy at one point. And I thought boys were more obvious about that. The girls/ladies are every bit as intent on it. — Ah, the young cousin did settle down, and it was one very strong outburst, but well, memorable! The funny thing is, she’s also very clear and level-headed, a fine young lady. But, well, that was very early high school, and … “Mom, Dad, stop the car! It’s HIM! Oooh! Aaaiiieee!!” Hahahaha. Her kid brother was not quite yet to that stage in life and was greatly embarrassed for his older male cousin to witness his sister being that weird. Heh. Ah, hmm, I’ve just realized, as far as I know, he’s quite straight. Though I don’t know, haven’t seen them in several years now. But yes, probably quite straight. And likely quiet about whoever he likes, knowing him.)
Funny that document collects spellings like popingay and popongaie, but I’d guess they’re now spelled popinjay.
I agree, goose-turd and Dead Spaniard, clearly they did not have good marketing / publicity instincts back then. Puke? Oh, dear, no. No, no, no.
But the one that most confuses me is “brown-blue.” Which is it, brown or blue? Or some grayish-brown, if you count blue as more towards a blue-grey or navy.
Note Also: We have ROY G BIV for the color spectrum because in the 1700’s, and with the spectrum observed, they thought “blue” was more toward cyan / aqua / turquoise, and “indigo” was more toward indigo, royal blue, cobalt blue, navy, and so on. Violet was (and still is, more specifically) more blue-violet than red-violet, while purple is more red-violet than blue-violet. And therefore, we get the confusing bit of rhyme where “violets are blue,” while just as confusingly, “roses are red,” you know, instead of rose or pink.
I recall reading somewhere that “pink” has been recorded as varying from a yellow color to a light blue color, before it settled down to the light magenta to light red color that most Latinate languages call rose; although that can be a brighter rose or magenta than English pink.
Brown-blue, though. I’d love to know what color they thought that was. Blue is roughly halfway around the color wheel from brown and orange, with some wiggle room depending on which hue of blue (toward cyan or toward true blue or indigo) or orange (more yellow, more red, or or pink/magenta sort of orange colors).
In color theory, you also get ‘warm’ or ‘cool’ shades, which is notable, as you said, in the difference between violet and purple. Violet has more of a bluish tone, making it cooler than purple with a warm reddish tone. Try explaining how lemon yellow is cool compared to butter yellow! Then you get the whole kafuffle of hues vs. tones vs. shades…
Though the whole color temperature concept only really works for black body radiation, which is increasingly rare in modern lights. A friend had a DSLR which could only set color temperature as light compensation. To demonstrate the problem, I set my monitor to pure green–between red and blue–and lit a globe with it. My pocket digital camera which compensates with RGB could “see” the extra green light and subtract it out; color temperature can’t. (A real life example would be if you were taking a picture next to a brightly sunlit green wall.)
Heh, violet/purple and green to yellow-green / chartreuse are right around the boundaries between “cool” (cyan and blue) and “warm” (red and yellow) colors, so they are sort of neutral for that, or they swing one way or the other, depending on the color cast. More bluish-greens are cooler, more yellowish-greens are warmer, reddish-violets are warmer, bluish-violets are cooler. (That’s restating what Chondrite said, with maybe a slightly different viewpoint from color theory.)
Walt is talking about a slightly different thing, but it’s related: the color cast (cooler or warmer, more bluish or more orangeish or greenish or purplish of what’s intended to be a “white” light source. It’s nearly always just slightly off-white, and natural sunlight is, yes, more golden (sunny) yellow.
It’s funny to me that we have “off-white,” which is usually a more creamy color, but we don’t have a corresponding “off-black” color we usually think of. “Charcoal” is a dark grey, and curiously, the standard color names used on the web have a “silver” for 25% black, a light grey, but not a “charcoal” for 75% black, a dark grey; and “orange” on the web named colors isn’t “orange” on the color wheel, which would be halfway between red and yellow. — And then I ran across the color “bistre” for conté crayons, which is a warm, slightly yellowish or reddish very dark grey. One of the other very standard conté crayons uses a red ochre, and those two, carbon black and red ochre, are the oldest known color pigments used, dating back to Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals, and I believe one Homo Erectus burial site had red ochre powder on top of the deceased, indicating they (Homo Erectus) had some sense of color and spiritual beliefs, which is…extraordinary.
Hue, shade, and tone. Heh, those are all slightly different in technical color theory, which I think Chondrite knows, versus how they are used in everyday speech. Hue is the color in degrees on the color wheel, such as red or green or blue. Shade is how light or dark it is, a “shade” or “tint” of a given color is how we usually think of it. Tone is, hmm, probably how saturated, vivid or dull / neutral a color is.
And there are two competing color-models used for computers and printing that, very aggravatingly, are different between the web standards (and old Macromedia Freehand, by the way) versus Adobe’s products. The web uses HSL, hue, saturation, and lightness, and Aodbe’s products use HSB, hue, saturation, and brightness. You’d think they’d be the same, but oh, no, how the web color model and the Adobe color model do those differs, not for hue, which they have in common, equivalent, but how they handle saturation related to lightness or brightness. (Personally, I like the web (and Freehand / Macromedia) model better, it’s more intuitive to me.) — Then there’s RGB and CMYK models, and a few others which are more obscure. As an aside, Pantone tried to add two more inks to the CMYK model for more accurate and saturated printing colors and a wider range of printed colors. But it didn’t catch on; almost nobody, printers or designers, wanted to deal with six inks plus spot colors. (Spot colors are pre-mixed ink colors, either used along with black or else supplemental to the CMYK colors.) Most people, before color inkjet printers, didn’t know what “cyan” or “magenta” were unless they were very into color, art, and design anyway.
So you get all sorts of things going about color, and how people perceive and use it. Color is something we humans love and use. It has associations with food and what’s safe or unsafe to eat, with danger or safety, with other moods and emotions, with natural world settings, and so on, all of which, humans love to associate with in a huge variety of ways.
While looking for inspiration one time, I came across a list of traditional Chinese and Japanese colors from dyes and inks used for centuries. That’s somewhere on wiki, and it’s really interesting, a huge range of subtle or bright colors, all from odd, naturally occurring substances used for dyes and pigments. Many are local to Asia or are particular to Asian traditional textiles, paints, and so on, and are quite different from the European traditional dyestuffs. There’s surely some overlap, and after trade between Europe and the Middle East and Asia and Africa began really flowing again in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, there have been borrowings, surely, especially now since the 20th century.