Orangeade
![[Colour courtesy of Chris's present.]](../images/orangepeel.jpg)
“Which came first, the orange fruit or the orange colour?” Nigel asked, and I felt compelled to answer, discovering in the process the bastard child of linguistic anthropology and colour theory: colour linguistics. (As an aside, the founding father of colour linguistics is British prime-minister William Gladstone, whose Homer and the Homeric Age of 1858 suggested that colour perception has evolved to something entirely different since the 8th century BCE based on the differences in colour terminology between Homeric Greek and contemporary languages.)
The etymology of the word “orange” can be traced back from Old French (pume orenge) to Old Italian (melarancio) to Arabic (naranj) to Persian (narang) to Sanskrit (naraga) to Dravidian, a family of languages spoken in southern India. These older terms refer to the orange tree (which originated in China and slowly made its way westward), which suggests that the name was used for the plant first.
This conjecture is further supported by Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berlin and Kay, 1969), in which the term for orange is only present in the last of seven evolutionary stages of sophistication in colour terminology, the first stage only containing terms for black (dark/cold) and white (light/warm) as in Dani (New Guinea), and the last containing eleven basic colour terms (white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple, grey), as in English.
The first recorded instance of the use of the word “orange” occurs in a Middle English text of 1380, referring to the fruit, which prompted Nigel to further enquire what term was used for the colour of a pumpkin prior to that time. I will postulate that there was no specific term for the visual effect of electromagnetic radiation between 590 and 630 nanometers before then. Then it would not be too far-fetched to suggest that the colour was described as light red or dark yellow, given that these terms occur already by stage III of Berlin and Kay’s seven vocabulary stages.
Color terms that work by association, like “pumpkin-coloured” or “rust-coloured,” can exist for every possible hue in nature, and could have been used to refer to orange. However, they fail to meet Berlin and Kay’s definition of basic colour terms as they are not monolexemic or psychologically salient (as they are not in common use). Orange, together with pink, purple, and grey, only occurs in stage VII, so it is fair to suggest that many languages use derivative terms for these colours. In English, the word “pink” is derived from a flower, much like the word “orange” is derived from the fruit. In Japanese, listed as a stage VII language, orange is “orenji” or “daidai” (a bitter variety of orange fruit), and pink is “pinku” or “momo-iro” (peach-colour). In Mandarin Chinese, a stage V language, orange and pink are “júhóngsède” (orange-fruit-red colour) and “fênhóngsè” (powder-red colour) respectively, which are not monolexemic and can be subsumed into the term for red.
Comments
maaan.. so much about orange.. where’d you find all that info.? bear in mind, i’m a little kiddie who knows nothing..
I can’t wait till I think of my next query.
I refuse to buy the story about the middle english being unable to communicate the concept of the colour of a pumpkin. though, it reminds me of my dutch lessons in delft - where they only taught us “groen”.
(and du~ude “fênhóngsè” is probably closer to “powdery red colour”) I think. My “Fun with Chinese Characters” book is still in the post.
That’s very interesting, but it doesn’t address Nigel’s question, which was ontological rather than etymological.
Nigel, the orange colour came first, perhaps only little time after the (postulated) Bing Bang. Oranges took a much longer time to come. Hope that helps.
(Reductio ad absurdum: if it weren’t for the already arrived orange colour, we’d be eating infrareds.)
Addendum: Another Japanese term for orange is “daidai,” which refers to a bitter variety of the orange fruit as well as to the color. An alternate term for pink is “pinku.”
Nigel, thanks for your correction in Mandarin, it has been edited into the entry. I need to buy a proper dictionary.
As for the Middle English, I agree that they probably had a way to communicate the notion of the colour of a pumpkin, but probably periphrastically. As I mention in the entry, there are many current languages which lack a basic term for that colour, one of them being Mandarin. Dani only has two basic colour terms, roughly equivalent to black and white. Languages in the Pomo family (Californian native Americans) only recognise black, white, and red with basic terms.
did “raph” read the bit about “pink”?
this is interesting.. hmm.. never realized Mandarin was one of the languages that lacked basic terms for color. lemme see..
firstly, there are other names for orange.. the one you used isn’t actually ‘orange-fruit-red’ as you put it.. more like ‘mandarin-fruit-red’.. there’s a difference between the fruits.. but they are of course of similar color. in this context about the color orange though, i believe you shouldn’t be using ‘mandarin-fruit-red’ to describe what the Chinese call orange.
i would personally use the more widely accepted ‘cheng se’ which actually means ‘orange color’.
now that i think of it, we have (monolexemic?) names for red (hong), orange (cheng), yellow (huang), green (lu), light-green (qing), blue (nan), purple(zi) - from our interpretation of the rainbow. there are also for silver (yin), gold (jin), copper (tong), grey (hui), brown (zong).. etc.
when it gets onto colors like light blue, we use ‘fen nan se’ (powder blue color). this relates back to pink being ‘fen hong se’. we basically interpret pink as light red.
now i’ve kinda deviated the entire conversation from whether orange came out first as a fruit or as a color. the example you used about pink being from the flower supports the idea that it’s possibly the fruit of orange came first.
i have another idea which might confuse everything altogether. about brown.. in Chinese terms.
in Mandarin, brown is ‘zong se’. being slightly Chinese-history-dumb, i have no idea where they got this from, but since coffee was invented the Cantonese have called brown ‘ka fei se’..and eventually shortened to ‘fei se’. since Cantonese are so influential throughout the Chinese population (honest about this one), the word ‘ka fei se’ has slipped into the average Mandarin speaker’s vocabuarly.
now my point is, what if the color orange was called something completely different before they had the fruit orange? maybe you’ve answered this question somewhere along the line, but i’m too young and dumb to be able to interpret the language..
but think about it.
Interestingly, Mandarin is a stage V language according to Berlin and Kay, meaning that is doesn’t have a “basic” term for brown either. Now, their research was published in 1969, and the language may have evolved since then. But more importantly, a significant problem in their work is that it is difficult to determine whether a colour term is “basic” or not. (They list four criteria: the term has to be monolexemic, not subsumable within another colour term, applicable broadly to many classes of objects, and psychologically salient.)
But the importance of their work, and what makes it useful for addressing Nigel’s question, is that with slight variations, the evolution of colour terminology appears to have happened in the seven stages that they identify. For the record stage I includes only black and white, stage II splits white (warm/bright) to white and red, stage III adds green or yellow, stage IV has both green and yellow, stage V adds blue, stage VI includes brown, and stage VII includes orange and/or pink and/or purple and/or grey.
Interesting anomalies: many Slavic languages share a term for blue and yellow, although it could be that the term was used for yellow first. It should also be noted that the word “blue” is an evolution of the “flavus,” a Latin term for yellow. The categorization of yellow and blue happens in several other languages, like Ainu (northern Japan). Red and Green is also combined in Ainu, while the Chinese character for green (lû in Mandarin) is a combination of the characters for fresh and red, suggesting semantic connotations between these colours.
You guys are all off topic. All, I say! Even “n” the creator of the topic.
haha. yes, we’ve all gone off topic. so orange.. and pumpkin.. la la la..
what was chris’ present? a pantone colour chart? - I want.
No, dude. Those things are expensive. It was a rubber document wallet. Thanks, Chris!
Quality!
Answered my question very nicely thank you.
Hello,
I am doing an essay about the etymology of the colour ‘purple’ and also its connotations, collocations,…
I would be very grateful if yoou could help me with any information you may have.
Thank you so much in advance! Sincerely, EVA.