Ruminations on Color

Some more light reading, this time from Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses -

At twilight, pink wings tremble along the hilltops, and purlpe does a shadow dance over the lake. When light hits a red car on the streetcorner, only the red rays are reflected into our eyes, and we say "red." The other rays are absorbed by the car's paint job. When light hits a blue mailbox, the blue is reflected, and we say "blue." The color we see is always the one being reflected, the one that doesn't stay put and get absorbed. We see the rejected color, and say "an apple is red." But in truth an apple is everything but red.

Not all languages name all colors. Japanese only recently included a word for "blue." In past ages aoi was an umbrella word that stood for the range of colors from green and blue to violet. Primitive languages first develop words for black and white, then add red, then yellow and green; many lump blue and green together, and some don't bother distinguishing between other colors of the spectrum....

Welsh uses the word glas to describe the color of a mountain lake, which might in fact be blue, gray, or green. In Swahili, nyakundu could mean brown, yellow, or red. The Jalé tribespeople of New Guinea, having no word for green are content to refer to a leaf as dark or light.