Green or Gray?

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!