▲ | adrian_b 4 days ago | |
Eliminating from your 11-item list the words that cannot designate saturated colors, i.e. black, white, brown, pink and gray, there remain 6 words for saturated colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. Besides these 6 words, 2 more words are useful for naming saturated colors. The use of the word "violet" is widespread enough that it should be added to the list as a basic English color term. The distinction between violet and purple is that while both are mixtures of red and blue, violet contains a small enough amount of red that it can be matched by a monochromatic color in the violet range of the spectrum, while purple contains an amount of red that is great enough so that it can be matched only by a mixture of monochromatic red with monochromatic blue. A word is needed for the blue-green color. Cyan is a misnomer that should be avoided, but "turquoise" is a word that has been used in English for many centuries for designating the blue-green color (and which is used for the same purpose in many other European languages, all of which have borrowed the word from French, like also English). "Teal" is another synonym for "blue-green", which has been introduced in the 20th century. There have been many misunderstandings about the words used by Isaac Newton for his circle of colors, but I believe that when his words are interpreted correctly, he was right. Isaac Newton has divided the saturated colors into 8 colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blew or blue, indico or indigo, violet and purple. The first 7 of these were classified as prismatic colors, i.e. as monochromatic colors. Isaac Newton spelled blue as both "blew" and "blue", and also indigo was spelled as both "indico" and "indigo". While the meaning of the other color words is not ambiguous, the meaning of these 2 words is not clear. The words used by Isaac Newton were the names of some paints, whose hue he compared with the colors obtained by the dispersion of the solar light. The "indico" paint was presumably made with the indigo pigment, so it must have been blue. The "blew" or "blue" of Isaac Newton was the color of the "blue Bise" paint. "Bise" is more frequently spelled "bice" and it was the name of a paint based on copper carbonate. Depending on the exact details of its method of preparation, such a paint will contain a mixture of malachite and azurite pigments, so it might have any hue between green and blue. We do not know who was Newton's paint supplier or any other details about the paint used by Newton, so it cannot be known for sure which was the real color of Newton's "blew". Nevertheless I assume that Newton's "blue Bise" was actually a blue-green paint, because only in this case Newton's classification of the saturated colors will make perfect sense, because blue-green and blue are distinctive enough to deserve to have their own names. So translated into modern English, the 8 saturated colors of Isaac Newton would be: red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue, violet and purple. This classification remains right. |