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English is weird
The Seldom Killer:
--- Quote from: LTK on 16 Sep 2012, 02:52 ---Then what did the English use for the color before discovering India?
--- End quote ---
Orange, like any of the prime colours is more of a collective word than a definitive term. Many different words would have been used prior to the discovery of the orange by English speakers* mostly giving a closer idea of the colour that the speaker, or indeed writer, was describing. However, Ochre and Ochreous would have probably been most common owing to it's broad tonal output and commonality as a dye.
*I suspect the word was more thrust on English speakers by the combinative force of French and Latin speakers.
Papersatan:
probably red. Color divisions are linguistic not optical.
English has 11 basic color categories :red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, white, grey and pink. but where exactly the divisions are between those colors are is still subject to some debate where does.
How many colors do you see there. If you were dividing that spectrum evenly into the colors on it would you have a word for each of them? Do some of your color words seem to take up more of the spectrum? Does it matter if a color is light or dark? or where it usually appears in your environment?
How much detail do we need in our color words?
Not all languages have 11 color words. A famous example is the Welsh "glas" which covers the colors we call "blue", "green" and "grey" another example is Himba, which has only 4 colors.
a video about the Himba's ability to distinguish color.
Is it cold in here?:
I can't find it on the first three searches, but xkcd did a survey about what people call different colors.
LTK:
That's because it's on the blog, not on the comic.
Barmymoo:
This one? Some of the answers are hilarious.
Oo, pipped to the post. Oh well.
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