Color Terms

The English language makes a distinction between blue and green, but some languages do not. Of these, quite a number, mostly in Africa, do not distinguish blue from black either, whilst there are a handful of languages that do not distinguish blue from black but have a separate term for green.^[1] Also, some languages treat light (often greenish) blue and dark blue as separate colors, rather than different variations of blue, while English does not.

According to Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's 1969 study Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, distinct terms for brown, purple, pink, orange and grey will not emerge in a language until the language has made a distinction between green and blue. In their account of the development of color terms the first terms to emerge are those for white/black (or light/dark), red and green/yellow.^[2]

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 dương "ocean grue" for blue). In the Thai language, เขียว (khiaw) means green except when referring to the sky or the sea, when it means blue; เขียวชอุ่ม (khiaw cha-um), เขียวขจี (khiaw khachi), and เขียวแปร๊ด (khiaw praed) have all meant either intense blue or garish green, although the latter is becoming more usual as the language 'learns' to distinguish blue and green. 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). The Korean word 푸르다 (pureuda) can mean either green or blue. In Japanese, the word for blue (青 ao) is often used for colors that English speakers would refer to as green, such as the color of a traffic signal meaning "go", or the color of unripe fruit such as bananas. Some Nguni languages of southern Africa, including Tswana utilize the same word for blue and green. 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 toward the 11-color Western scheme, restricting glas to blue and using gwyrdd for green and llwyd for grey. Similarly, in Irish, glas can mean various shades of green and grey (like the sea), while liath is grey proper (like a horse), and the term for blue proper is gorm (like the sky or Cairngorm mountains), although gorm can also in some contexts mean black - sub-saharan black people would be referred to as daoine gorma, or blue people. In Old Norse the word blå was also used to describe black (and the common word for people of African descent was thus blåmenn 'blue/black men'). In Swedish, blå, the modern word for blue, was used this way until the early 20th century.