Image by Disha Gadhiya via Flickr"Deutscher has a lot of fun relating the discovery that colour words emerge in all languages in a predictable order. Black and white come first, then red, then yellow, then green and finally blue. (Although sometimes green is before yellow.) Red is probably first because it is the colour of blood and of the easiest dyes to make in the wild. Green and yellow are the colours of vegetation. And blue is last because – with the exception of the sky – few naturally occurring things are blue and blue dyes are very difficult to make."The relationship between language and coginition is a fascinating one- I remember an article at the Edge by Lera Boroditsky - it defined the influence of language on coginition in my mind. There were several articles at the New York Times too, regarding how the words and images we use to describe the world impinge upon our consciousness, manipulating the way we feel objects outside us and the environment around us.
The interesting part of this article is the claim that we found the word for blue only recently, after we had named all other colours- Homer never described the sky as blue, writes Bellos, and I remember that in our Myths too, Lord Krishna is described not as black, but blue: could it be that he was originally described as black, and later in a strange reversal, his colour was changed to blue- or could it be that blue is black, and the two were coterminous words that meant the same thing in Sanskrit?
