Cultural Colors

Not too much time today to post…thought I’d take a couple minutes to teach you something I thought was cool. I loved cultural anthropology in college, and I always learned interesting things.

In our society, we’ve got basically 9 main colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, black and gray. Of course, you’ve got the hundreds of different shades of those colors that have their own names, too, like lime, burgundy, navy, cyan, gold, etc.

What’s the least number of colors names that a society has had? Two - light and dark. Of course, there’s different shades of gray between that spectrum, but cultures that have names for colors usually start off with two - one for light, and one for dark. For societies that have three colors, the next color to get a name is red. After red, then comes blueish-green (the Chinese see blue and green as shades of the same base color).

Interesting?

Maybe not, but I had nothing else to say today. :)
p.s. Of course, I may be remembering this all wrong, so I apologize if I’m just speaking out of my ass.

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2 Comments

2005-09-27 16:56:44

suki says

:P Still interesting. It’s funny how the same word for blue/green is used to describe clarity in Chinese.

 
2005-09-27 17:04:47

SusanG says

Well San Francisco is obviously one of those culturally limited locals. Everyone here wears basically black and khaki, or some variation with solid color tops. Intersting Yano :)

 

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