Beth of the Cassandra Pages is an old friend (my wife and I visited her in Montreal in 2004: 1, 2) and it’s always a pleasure to hear from her; she’s sent me a link to You see grēne where I see grœg from a Scottish knitting blog written by Kate Davies, whom Beth calls “a very smart designer,” and while it’s mostly about colors themselves, there’s enough linguistic material I thought I’d bring it here.
Your responses to yesterday’s piece – in which I introduced KC’s fabulous Chingly Yorlin – really interested me. In both the Ravelry group and newsletter comments, many of you suggested that you do not see Chingly as I do – as a greenish-grey – but as very definitely green. […] Whether we see / name a colour as “green” or “grey” can depend on many factors: the physical mechanics of perception, our cultural heritage, our linguistic positioning, and (it is now increasingly clear) our age. […]
As grey is one of those shades which, for many of us it seems, perpetually hovers in an area of chromatic indeterminacy, you may be interested to know that, in some languages, it is among the first colours to be named. In Old English, grœg (grey, grey-ish) is a basic colour term (or BCT) that appears in the language at an earlier date than blue (hœwen) and which is used in a wide variety of contexts in reference to everything from wolves and stones to stormy seas.* [*My discussion of of grey and green in Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic draws heavily on Carole Biggham and Kirsten Wolf’s excellent A Cultural History of Colour in the Medieval Age, volume 2 in Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Colour series (2021; 2024)]
Gren (grēne) is a BCT that precedes blue in the Old English language too: in reference to freshness or newness, to un-ripe or uncooked things, to glassy gemstones and to metals with a colourful patina, such as copper or brass. Grēne also frequently appears in Old English place names in association with landmarks, property boundaries, and objects in the natural world, such as paths, hills, and trees.
While grēne and grœg are both Old English BCTs, then, grey is also associated with a surprising number of non-basic, or secondary terms in this language such as hasu (a brown-ish grey which is used in reference to the plumage of many birds) and fealu (a pale, yellow-ish or red-ish-grey).
Grey and green (grár and grœn) are BCTs in Old Norse-Icelandic too, with grár possessing, as Kirsten Wolf puts it, “stability of reference across Old Norse-Icelandic texts spanning several centuries and across various types of vocabulary” By the time of the very earliest literary documents in Old Norse-Icelandic, grár possesses, in Wolf’s words “a well-established achromatic meaning (without hue).” Her work shows how the development and consolidation of grar as one of the earliest Old Norse-Icelandic BCTs historically preceded that of grœnn (green).
Fascinatingly, while grey is one of the earliest and well-documented colour terms in these northern languages, it is emphatically not so in those of the European south or east: in Latin, Greek, or Old East Slavi[c] (Old Russian) grey is very low down in the list of early-documented shades.
My own linguistic parameters remain rather narrowly European, and I unfortunately know nothing about the development or consolidation of grey / green BCTs in Mandarin or Japanese, Urdu or Punjabi (perhaps speakers of these languages can enlighten us?). But I often find myself wondering just how far the long linguistic / cultural heritage of those of us who speak the modern European languages which arose out of Old English and Icelandic, Latin and Greek, affects the very particular ways in which we now see, describe, and understand rather blurry colour concepts such as “grey” and “green”.
The rest is about perception, and is interesting in its own right; there are a great many gorgeous photographs as well. As for the Old English words, grǣġ (her “grœg,” with the wrong ligature) is the West Saxon form of what is also written grei(g) ‘gray/grey’; hǽwen (again, her “hœwen” has the wrong ligature) is s.v. haw (“Obsolete exc. Scottish”) in the OED, which defines it as “Blue, azure; bluish, grayish- or greenish-blue”; hasu, from Proto-West Germanic *hasu, has left no modern descendant but has a relative in French hâve ‘gaunt’; and fealu is modern fallow ‘pale red or yellow, light brown.’ The OED says of it:
The semantic range of the word as a colour term in early use in English, as well as the other older Germanic languages, has been the subject of considerable discussion, especially its use in Old English verse, where it occurs in some unexpected contexts, e.g. describing the sea or its waves (this particular usage survives into Middle English verse; compare quots. OE³, c1440 at sense A.1). It has been suggested that such early uses may imply a degree of brightness rather than a specific hue. Compare also the use with reference to pallor of the human face (compare quot. c1405 at sense A.1 and also fallow v.¹ 2).
Thanks, Beth!
The article says, “many of you agreed that this colour represented something of a challenge, because it seemed rather unusual.”
It looks very familiar to me: one of the ones I can’t identify.
Yes, I’m terrible at identifying colors.
I would say it’s a brownish-green. However, I have red-green colorblindness, and this is exactly the kind of shade where I know I have a hard time picking up hues that most people see more easily.
Previously at Language Hat: GREY/GRAY etymology and history.
Thanks for pointing out the misspellings with œ for æ. Also, Carole Biggam’s name is misspelled.
DSL has haw defined as “Of a pale, wan colouring, tinged with blue or green”, with citations up to the early 20th century.
Japanese traditionally treated blue (aoi: 青) and green (midori: 緑) as part of a broader “cool” category. I believe the separate green (緑) emerged as late as the 12th century. The distinction is clear in modern Japanese but remnants remain. For example, everyone who studies basic Japanese learns that green traffic signals are officially ao shingō (青信号), and that green apples or vegetables can be aoi.
Graubraun to graugrün. Needs better lighting.
It’s also what hares are named for, thanks to the wonders of Verner’s law.
Falb remains a coat color in German; Felis lybica is sometimes called Falbkatze.
(*lw, *rw > lb, rb within or right after OHG.)
Falb remains a coat color in German
Another cognate is French fauve, according to Wiktionary.
Bah. Three basic colour terms should be enough for anybody. Black, white, red. Everything else is just technical terms or similes. Or technical similes.
Fauve previously at Language Hat: marie-lucie said
Somehow one doesn’t think of Germanic soldiers as the ones with the refined color sense.
Warrior poets all.
…fallow ‘pale red or yellow, light brown.’ The OED says of it: […] unexpected contexts, e.g. describing the sea or its waves […] suggested that such early uses may imply a degree of brightness rather than a specific hue. Compare also the use with reference to pallor of the human face…
my mileage apparently varies from the OED writer’s – to me those are perfectly sensible things to describe with that color, and the color-word gives me pretty specific information about them that hardly strikes me as “unexpected”. and now i’m wondering about the boundaries of expectation with different color words that have to work for sea, waves, and faces… fuschia would be a surprise, i think. or an electric teal.
Take that, Berlin and Kay 1969! (The link is in the original blog post and goes to Wikipedia’s page on that book. It might be useful to copy the link into the quotation in this post too.) They put grey (their spelling) at the highest/last stage, claiming that languages wouldn’t develop a word for it until after they already had all of black, white, red, yellow, green, and blue — although they admitted even then to “the premature appearance of grey”* in a few of the languages they looked at, and allowed that perhaps it should be a “wild-card”. By the mid-1970s, Kay and others had accepted that yes, gray could appear at various earlier stages. Of course you can still find a lot of people repeating the obsolete 1969 version, so it’s good to see that Kate Davies has read a good, recent source and knows better.
* Insert “prematurely gray” joke here.
Re fallow, DWDS has
—
fahl Adj. ‘blaß, farblos’ (bis ins 17. Jh. auch ‘blond’ von Haar und Bart, danach durch blond verdrängt, s. d.). Ahd. falo, flektiert falawēr (s. falb) ‘fahl, rotgelb, braungelb’… engl. fallow, anord. fǫlr, germ. *falwa- geht mit lit. pálšas, pal̃vas ‘blaßgelb, falb’, lat. pallēre ‘blaß, bleich sein’, pallidus ‘bleich’ und griech. poliós (πολιός) ‘weißlich, grau’ auf die Wurzel ie. *pel- zurück, die unscharfe Farben ‘grau, fahl’, auch ‘scheckig’ bezeichnet. Im Nhd. stehen zunächst fahl und das aus den flektierten Formen entstandene falb (s. d.) bedeutungsgleich nebeneinander; Ende 17. Jh. tritt Bedeutungsdifferenzierung ein: fahl ‘bleich, blaß’ und falb ‘graugelb’.
—
So maybe for English the original meaning was something like ‘with a bleached version of the expected colour’, e.g., compare fallow deer and red deer.
It might be useful to copy the link into the quotation in this post too.
Done.
Oh. Yes. A doublet like shade & shadow in English.
The falling tone* shows the root must have been *pelH- instead of *pel-, as was already clear from the extra i in Vedic palitá- “gray” and the Hurrian horse color parita-.
The rising tone* here looks like it’s due to the phonetically bizarre but robustly reconstructed** Saussure effect: all laryngeals were deleted in PIE in the sequences *-oRH. and *.HRo- (note the syllable boundaries; *R stands for *m, *n, *l, *r, *w, *j), so the Balto-Slavic falling tone had no chance to arise.
This of course leads to the question of why the Saussure effect didn’t apply in pálšas. I suspect the a was copied in from other forms after tonogenesis and replaced an *e. If this works, the “crow”-“raven” pair we recently discussed is explained, too, BTW.
* The diacritics traditionally used in Lithuanian dictionaries, and the names that go with them (“acute” for falling, “circumflex” for rising), are upside-down due to a misguided 19th-century attempt to homologize the Baltic accents with the Greek ones. Basically, *-ˈV.HV- gives a “circumflex” long-vowel-or-diphthong in both branches: in Greek because the original pitches (*-[V́HV̀]-) are kept, in Balto-Slavic because there is no syllable-final *H and therefore no “acute”.
** On Andrew Byrd’s Academia page there was a beautiful presentation on this “crazy rule” (the technical term). The entire page has been nuked from orbit.
Irish distinguishes glas “natural-green~grey” from uaine “artificial-green”. The Irish flag is officially defined as uaine, bán, agus flannbhuí, “artificial-green, white, and blood-red–yellow”.
*pelH-
Eerily reminiscent of proto-Oti-Volta *pe:l- “white”, where the vowel length probably reflects compensatory lengthening following the loss of some kind of continuant after the *l …
The awesome power of sheer coincidence manifests once more.
mollymooly: the overtones may be otherwise in Goidelic, but it would somehow seem less inspiring for Yeats to say
Now and in time to be,
Wherever artificial-green is worn
OTOH one imagines some folks up north might be happy to embrace membership in the Loyal Blood-Red-Yellow Order?
@mollymooly: When I think of “artificial green,” my mind goes to uranium glass. Surprisingly, uaine and uranium likely are cognates. The probably both go back to the the Proto-Indo-European “water” words—the former for obvious reasons of color, the latter going back to the sky as the “rain maker.”
My parents had a set of very green Tiffin glasses (Madeira design), which they seem to be unaware were colored with uranium salts. I have been buying some from antique stores (including a couple pieces my parents never had), since I discovered that they glow under ultraviolet illumination. I know one antique dealer one of whose specialties is fluorescent glass, whom I got several of the glasses from and who is on one the lookout for me for another, much rarer, size of goblet. He also sells other kinds of fluorescent glass, particularly with cadmium and a few pieces with selenium. The cadmium glass tends to have the fluorescent cadmium salts mixed rather irregularly into the glass, so only certain spots on a piece will glow under ultraviolet light. One piece he has on sale is a cadmium glass relish tray with a Last Supper design, and the biggest glob of fluorescent cadmium is right on Judas Iscariot’s face.
@jwb
I think the many Orange Gaeilgeóirí have to content themselves with a designation of buí (= yellow). Considering that the many Black Gaeilgeóirí (not Black Protestants, that is something different) are stuck with gorm (= blue), this may not be so bad.
@pp you are five years out of date
@Brett: Funny that uranium was used to color pottery glaze orange. I’ve eaten salad off orange Fiestaware, once. Once might be about the right number of times for drinking from a cadmium-containing glass, too, but I assume you’ve looked into that.
Perhaps my favorite part when I took inorganic chemistry (generally a terrible class) was discussing how you get intense colors from charge transfer bands in transition metal complexes.
>>fallow … fahl
>A doublet like shade & shadow in English.
Fell and fallow? Wiktionary says no, but I wonder how close Germanic falwaz and faluz might be? A meaning of fierce coming from a meaning of the rust/yellow/brown of a wild animal’s coat, or vice versa would seem plausible if the sound changes can work.
>On Andrew Byrd’s Academia page…
I’ll offer an unrelated Andrew BVrd
All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.
That does not work. Wiktionary on uaine: “From Old Irish úaine, úanne (“green, verdant”),[3] from possible Proto-Celtic *udniyos, from Proto-Indo-European *wed- (“wet”).” That can’t be united with Uranus, on which see this mess.
You could get the former from the latter as a grammatical innovation*, not as a sound change, and then probably only in rather ancient times; I don’t know if there are any parallels in Germanic.
* “thematization” – transfer to the largest declension class by adding PIE *-o-.
As long as we’re doing poetry, this thread keeps making me think of my favorite G. K. Chesterton poem:
Chesterton is playing with the same color contrast as e.g. Goethe (who tbf threw a bonus color into the mix):
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.
When I clicked on the picture, I immediately thought of The wanderer: gesihð him biforan fealwe wegas.
There is one blasphemy: for death to pray,
For God alone knoweth the praise of death.
wow! i hadn’t realized that chesterton’s kryptonite would’ve been a Sacred Harp singing!
and now i get to do my favorite real-life version of an ancient joke, even!
245!
Like “rozele”, I find gray/grey an unsurprising description of the sea, depending on the place and the weather. As for poetry, here’s a post-Middle English example:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43766/meeting-at-night
Nobody would be surprised at “gray” describing the sea — the word that rozele was talking about was “fallow”.