DailyDirt: Bullet The Blue

Ramblings

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

When people talk about colorful language, they’re usually referring to foul language. But more literally, words for colors in our language(s) can affect how we perceive and react to colors. The word for blue is particularly interesting due to its surprisingly infrequent use in older texts. Here are just a few links relating colors and words.

• Different languages describe colors in ways that sometimes can’t be translated exactly, and these linguistic definitions can affect how people perceive colors. The Russian language has very specific words for different shades of “blue” (and no term for “blue” in general), and Russians have distinctly different reactions to blue than English speakers do. [url]
• A color-coded analysis of various English texts according to word origins can show some interesting patterns that could be unique to certain genres of writing. British literature has more words from Anglo-Saxon origins, but other kinds of writing has different mixtures… if only spam were easily identified by this kind of analysis. [url]
• Ancient greeks wouldn’t have described the sky as blue…. Homer did not use “blue” at all, and maybe Greeks didn’t see colors the same way we do today. But other ancient civilizations didn’t use blue in their written languages, either. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: blue, colors, english, greek, homer, language, russian