The other day I received another shipment of Grüns.1
This brought to mind a topic I’ve been thinking of writing about: color names, and the odd ways they split along language lines.
Green is typical. The ten most spoken languages in Europe have three different ways of saying it.
The Germanic:
English green
German Grün
Dutch groen
The Slavic:
Polish zielony
Russian зеленый
Ukrainian зелений
The Romance:
French vert
Italian, Romanian, and Spanish verde
These three sets of words trace back to three different Proto-Indo-European roots with very similar meanings:
Green and its cognates come from *gʰreh₁-, meaning “to grow.”
Zielony and its cognates come from *ǵʰelh₃-, meaning “to flourish.”2
Vert and its cognates come from *weys-, meaning “to increase” or “to procreate.”
A division like this holds true for many color words, with some interesting exceptions.
Consider “blue.” I won’t get into the complexity of Slavic blue-words. But even with the Romance languages there’s a split to be seen:
French bleu follows Germanic blauw/blue/Blau.
Italian azuro and Spanish azul come from the Arabic (and, ultimately, the Persian) word for lapis lazuli.
Romanian albastru comes from Latin albus, “white.”3
Within the ten languages, purple (of Latin–Greek origin) is unique to English. Most of the others use names related to the violet flower; German goes with Lila, from a French word for “lilac.” Spanish morado comes from a word for mulberry.4
Black, which etymologically means burnt, is another English odd-man-out, contrasting with Germanic words like Schwarz, Romance words like nero, and Slavic words like czarny.
The word for “pink” is the most consistent across these languages: in every one except English, it traces back to Latin rosa, the flower. English pink is derived from a different flower name, and is a relative latecomer: well into the early modern period, the standard English name for this color was rosy or rose.
English, in its all-swallowing catholicity, includes as minor or secondary color names many words similar to other languages’. We have not only blue, but also azure; not only purple, but also violet and lilac; not only black, but swarthy. Rosy remains a live word.
Sources for this post: The information for Ukrainian comes mostly from this LingoHut lesson. The information for Romanian was pieced together from Wiktionary and Google Translate. The information for the other languages comes from this handy chart. Most of the etymological information comes from Wiktionary.
Yessiree, that’s an affiliate link.
Grüns are the only multivitamin gummi that respects the fact no one can eat just one gummi at a time: they come eight to a serving, in convenient pre-portioned snack packs. (That link again…)
They are also culturally interesting: a product made in America by an American-based company, but with a pseudo-German name. For what it’s worth, the Umlautzeichen aren’t just decorative: official advertistments use the pronunciation “groons.”
This is also the ultimate source of German Gelb, Greek chlorós (“yellow-green”) and two English words referring to bile: choler and gall.
So does the Romanian word for “white” itself, alb.
Albastru is not related to alabaster.
The heraldic tincture murrey also refers to a mulberry.