Blue: Encyclopedia II - Blue - Naming and etymology

Blue - Naming and etymology

Many languages do not have separate terms for blue and green, instead using a cover term for both (when the issue is discussed in linguistics, this cover term is sometimes called grue in English). For example, in Vietnamese both tree leaves and the sky are xanh (to distinguish, one may use xanh lá cây "leaf grue" for green and xanh nước "water grue" for blue). Chinese has a word 青 qīng that can refer to both, though it also has separate words for blue (蓝 / 藍 lán) and green (绿 / 綠 lǜ). In traditional Welsh (and related Celtic languages), glas could refer to blue but also to certain shades of green and grey; however, modern Welsh is tending towards the 11-color Western scheme, restricting glas to blue and using gwyrdd for green and llwyd for grey. In the Swedish language, blå, the modern word for blue, was used to describe black until the early 20th century.

The modern English word blue comes from the Middle English, where it began to be used along with bleu, an Old French word of Germanic origin (possibly Old High German blao, "shining"). A Scots and Scottish English word for "blue-grey" is blae, from the Middle English bla ("dark blue", from the Old English blæd). As a curiosity, blue is thought to be cognate with blond and black, with Latin flavus (yellow, cf. flavescent and flavine) and with Russian белый belyi (white, cf. beluga), all of which derive (according to the American Heritage Dictionary) from the PIE root *bhel- meaning "to shine, flash or burn", whence the names of various bright colors, and that of color black from a derivation meaning "burnt" (other words derived from this root include bleach, bleak, blind, blank, blush, blaze, flame, fulminate, flagrant and phlegm).

On the other hand, Russian does not have a single word that refers to the whole range of colors denoted by the English term "blue". Instead, it treats light blue (голубой goluboy) as a separate color independent from plain/dark blue (синий siniy), while in English the light blues like azure and cyan are considered mere shades of "blue" and not shades of a different color. To better understand this, consider that English makes a similar distinction between "red" and light red (i.e. "pink", which is considered a different color and not merely a kind of red), but this distinction is unknown in several other languages; for example, both "red" (红 / 紅 hóng) and "pink" (粉红 fěn hóng, lit. powder red) have traditionally been considered varieties of a single color in Chinese. Finally, it has been argued that Turkish treats dark blue (lacivert, curiously a cognate of English azure and lapis lazuli) as a separate color from plain/light blue (mavi).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Naming and etymology", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki