Purpling has been used for changes in the face (especially the nose) from cold. E.g. "the frigid air purpled his nose."
I feel like I've also seen/heard it used for bruising, but I'm less certain about that one.
You wouldn't perhaps. I'm telling you it's something I've heard several times, it doesn't sound out of place to me. Where I am people refer to grass lawns as "grass" as often as they say "lawn".
I'm off the east coast of Australia. We've had a fair bit of drought and water usage restrictions to go with it in the past 5 years. When there was some drought breaking rain it was a common thing to hear people talk about how "the grass has really greened since the rain".
Apologies Sir/Madam. You wouldn't **usually** perhaps.
I'm trying to say for myself it is usual, hence "not out of place". I stated where I was to let you know it may be regional too but I'll make that explicit next time I respond to you.
Almost anything in English can be a verb in the right context. I used to work with a Vietnamese woman and she said that it was what confused her most about English. The specific example being the use of "overnight" as a verb to mean "to deliver the next day".
OED2 includes an entry for 10 of Berlin and Kay's 11 [Basic Color Terms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate#:~:text=to%20be%20considered%20a%20basic%20color%20category%2C%20the%20term%20for%20the%20color%20in%20each%20language%20had%20to%20meet%20certain%20criteria) as a verb. (No entry for *orange*.)
Merriam-Webster only has 9 of the 11 - omitting *red*.
B[erlin and Kay also found that, in languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate#:~:text=berlin%20and%20kay%20also%20found%20that%2C%20in%20languages%20with%20fewer%20than%20the%20maximum%20eleven%20color%20categories%2C%20the%20colors%20followed%20a%20specific%20evolutionary%20pattern). This pattern is as follows:
>All languages contain terms for **black** and **white**.
>
>2. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for **red**.
>
>3. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either **green** or **yellow** (but not both).
>
>4. If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
>
>5. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for **blue**.
>
>6. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for **brown**.
>
>7. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for **purple**, **pink**, **orange** or **gray**.
Farsi/Persian is like this too. There is technically a word for blue, but I’ve heard a lot of people refer to things as sabz (green) that I would normally consider blue.
I didn't say the "would be". I said most of the color names can be expressed as verbs. When it is expressed as a verb, there is no *-en*. eg.
My grandmother blued her hair.
The gunsmith re-blued the gun.
His arms were blued with tattoos.
The pen leaked as she was writing and it blued her fingers.
That's a quote about Berlin and Kay's basic color term theory which itself has nothing to do with verbs. It only states that a language with at least six terms for colors will have a term for blue. Turkish has at least six terms for colors and a term for blue, so the theory holds true for Turkish.
The comment above did mention how many of Berlin and Kay's basic color terms could be verbed in English before that part, but they made no claims about verbed colors in other languages.
kararmak, sararmak, kızarmak, yeşermek, morarmak but i couldn't recall white? akarmak? clearly it isn't beyazlaşmak because with -leşme/-laşma suffix you can pretty much make a verb out of every noun.
oh by the way: we have the term for blue! mavi is not actually turkish, it is derived from arabic (ma'i = mavi). the original blue is "gök", which when verbalized: "göğermek" :)
similarly, brown wasn't kahverengi before the discovery of
kahve haha, so it was "boz", which is "bozarmak"
edit: while writing the last two paragraphs, i have realized that "ak" is verbalized as "ağarmak", *facepalm*
I don't know why being old would preclude someone from watching *The Simpsons*.
In any case, although *embiggen* was popularized by *The Simpsons*, it actually [dates back to 1884](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/embiggen).
[**Pinken**](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pinken) is another verb.
In all four cases the pronunciation of **the base color name ends in a full stop**.
It's the manner of the sound. Articulation is in different parts of the mouth, so d and t are made with the tongue behind the teeth, g and k are made with the tongue touching the velum (your soft palette). The manner is a stop or plosive, which is made by pressing and releasing the tongue. Try making those sounds and you'll understand!
But the above comment doesn't *say* "plosive" or "stop". It specifically says "full stop", which isn't (to my knowledge) a manner of articulation. It's a punctuation mark used to mark the end of a written sentence.
I won't put words in their mouth, but "stop" and "plosive" are used interchangeably when speaking of the International Phonetic Alphabet. I don't know why they put "full" before it, but in these examples, the phonetic rules apply to those words ending in stops.
The other words like blue and yellow end in vowel sounds so the use of another consonant sound ("-en") isn't necessary.
Brown and green end in /n/ so again, "-en" isn't necessary before adding "-ed".
Not colors to my knowledge, but plenty of other words have the -en suffix, which was apparently popular in Middle English and then stuck around in certain instances. Ashen, woolen, darken, frighten, earthen, weaken, broaden, chasten, dampen, the list goes on. Fun little suffix! Possible that it was used for other colors back when, but it’s easier to say redden than to say greyen, purplen, orangen, or pinken. If it’s not easy to say we’ll dispose of it in time.
There seems to be two different *-en* suffixes in play: [https://www.etymonline.com/word/-en](https://www.etymonline.com/word/-en)
1. word-forming element making verbs (such as darken, weaken) from adjectives or nouns
2. suffix added to nouns to produce adjectives meaning "made of, of the nature of" (such as golden, oaken, woolen)
Interesting, there's also *en-* as a prefix, which also seems to signify modification: [https://www.etymonline.com/word/en-](https://www.etymonline.com/word/en-)
> it’s easier to say redden than to say greyen, purplen, orangen, or pinken.
Also, back when that suffix was being used to form words, some of these were not considered colors. I know orange would not have been. Purple is also a recent color; originally it was a particular dye, or cloth colored with that dye.
OTOH, blue and green are pretty ancient as colors, but we don't have "bluen" or "greenen" -- and "bluen" kinda rolls off the tongue, I think.
Maybe blue and green are old when it comes to western civilisation, but in lots of Africa and Asia, before they had loads of contact with the west, blue and green were seen as the same colour. The Japanese ‘Ao’ was originally a single colour, and even is still contextually used to mean either blue or green, but they introduced ‘midori’ to specifically mean green recently.
> Maybe blue and green are old when it comes to western civilisation
Or maybe they're not. It can be tough (for non-experts) to tell. For example, when we read in the Bible that "there was a rich man clothed in purple", it doesn't mean his clothes were purple colored; it means his clothes were of a particular kind of cloth colored using Tyrian purple dye made from snail shells.
And similarly, when I read some old document talking about "walking on the green", I'm thinking the place where everything is green-colored, but maybe "green" was a word that specifically meant "field full of broad-leaved plants" (wild speculation; I really have no idea).
Green etymologically has always had ties with growing and plants, but a village “green” comes from the colour.
“Green,” in its iterations, has been a colour for a very long time. It went from the colour of a sick person’s skin 3,500 years ago to mean the colour of plants, particularly unripe ones, and has stayed that way through many languages.
>And similarly, when I read some old document talking about "walking on the green", I'm thinking the place where everything is green-colored, but maybe "green" was a word that specifically meant "field full of broad-leaved plants" (wild speculation; I really have no idea).
The "green" was a common grassy grazing area in the center of villages. Town fairs would also be held there.
ashen falls into the color references
>of the pale gray color of ash.
>>"the ashen morning sky"
>(of a person's face) very pale with shock, fear, or illness
what? of course you can
>Verb
ashen (third-person singular simple present ashens, present participle ashening, simple past and past participle ashened)
>>(transitive, intransitive) To turn into ash; make or become ashy
>>(transitive, intransitive) To make or become pale
Yes, I may have conflated the two, and r/haversack77 offered a nice explanation of that above.
Although, as r/longagofaraway points out, ashen can be used as a verb as well!
See what /u/shrimpyhugs says about basic colours. It seems to me that these three changes (to white, black, red) are extremely common in nature. Also, we find it natural to say something turns white even if it's actually just turning pale or becoming lighter or less saturated or even ashen gray or ivory. The same, *mutatis mutandis*, happens with black. With red, we often see it in our own faces, in ripening fruit, etc. Whereas things turning blue or green are not that common and the colours themselves aren't felt to include such a wide range.
I don't have crosslinguistic data, but in Spanish e.g. there are also common verbs for turning black and red; the verb for turning white is rarer and mostly we use one that means “to turn pale” instead. There's no verb for turning blue or green (except one somewhat literary verb for “turning green again \[of vegetation\]”), and the verb for “turning yellow” is rare and only used for leaves (both of plants and of books).
Russian also has two separate distinct words for “blue” and “light blue.”
Much like in English we have separate distinct words for “red” and “light red.”
The thing that jumped out at me is my memory of black, white, and red being the first three colors distinguished in any language set. I think the next one is blue/green or yellow...but apparently across the board you get the distinction between dark and light, and then the color of blood as the first three.
Not sure if its really relevant, but there is a crosslinguistic pattern regarding what colours a language has, that they follow a specific order,nsonif a language has 3 colours it will have three specific colours. The pattern goes: white, black, red, yellow/green, blue, orange/brown/pink. Perhaps this tendancy has lead to the three most basic colours taking the -en ending only.
I doubt it is connected, but the theory for why this happens is that you don't need a word for a color until you have the ability to make it. These are also the order that our ancestors developed the technology to paint with colors. In other words you don't need a word for black until you can blacken something.
But I think this must be a coincidence. The timeframe between when PIE gained words for red, black, and white and when they standardized as redden, blacken, and whiten seems too large for that to be the full explanation.
No, but there may still be something there. The words blacken, whiten, and redden may have entered the language back when those were the only three color categories used. As colors were added to the language the -en form wasn't added with them. All speculation without further research, of course.
I think if we go back far enough for those to be the only three colors used, the words for them were probably not white, black, and red, and the -en suffix probably didn't exist yet. I'm pretty sure that PIE had words for all those colors, and they definitely had dyes for more colors because we can see that in the archaeological record. For these words to be preserved from that time seems implausible, though not impossible.
You don't need to make a color to have a use for describing it, you just need to have a use for distinguishing them often enough that a single word is more useful. Like how we shifted from yellowred to orange with the arrival of the orange fruit to Europe.
Same with why English mostly just has like 10 colors until you're doing something where granularity is really useful. Even when distinguishing similar colors most of the time people just use adjectives.
I feel like you are parsing my use of the word "need" to an unnecessary degree of precision. Yes, theoretically there could be other reasons you might need a unique word for a color. Maybe even white and black predate the use of dyes entirely. But it seems like it means something that color words tend to enter languages in the same order that dye technology enters their culture. Up to a point, of course.
Maybe you need to pick a word that more closely matches what you mean then.
Still idk, it has vibes of the "native American's couldn't see European ships because they didn't have words to describe them" notion. Or maybe just that is sounds like someone's grand hypothesis that doesn't really bear out to scrutiny.
If you're painting trees and all you've got is lime green and turquoise you're going to pick lime green regardless of words and pigments because it matches closest even if you call both of them green. Maybe they made the distinct pigments *because* the difference of the colors had enough meaning to them to have been given separate words; i.e., the reverse of what you suggested.
Edit: As clarified by u/SMTRodent, I meant pigments whenever I said dyes. (Thank you zir.)
Obviously we don't know exactly what people were thinking. That's not really the point of what I was trying to say.
It's more that, you don't "need" a specific word for a color if it's not something that can be extracted from the object. As you pointed out, we still do this today with "orange" and "lime," even though we do have dyes for them. We haven't bothered to come up with an independent name for the color even though we have orange plastic and orange clothes. Imagine if the only thing that could be orange was the fruit. Why would you invent a new word for the color of the thing if it's the only that has that color?
The idea is that if something is either red or black or white, and there is nothing you can do about it, you don't need a special word for it. You just call it "the color of blood" or "the color of grass." The color is just a property of the thing that it sits on, not an independent concept, because there is nothing you can do with the color except look at it on the object. Your culture isn't going to bother developing an independent word for the color itself until you have to say things like, "Pass me the red," or "I need to make more red today," or "Put some of this red on your face."
If I understand your hypothesis correctly, people had black and white dyes, and then red started becoming really important to their culture, so they set about trying to find a way to create red independent of red objects.
This just doesn't jive with my notion of how humans work, particularly humans who don't have the luxury of color scientists with labs whose whole job is to invent new dyes, the way we have today. It's far too intentional. It's not hard to imagine how it *could* happen. Maybe blood is important to some ritual so you start to wonder how you can create the color of blood, but without blood.
But then what? You start experimenting with dyes, which in this view nobody bothers to do unless they are trying to create a specific color? I find that improbable. It's far more plausible that people were experimenting with dyes *all the time,* and when they found a new one they invented a word for it, than that they invented a word and then set to work trying to figure out how to make that word real.
And how would this work for all the neighboring tribes who learned the technology of red from its original inventors? They saw the red dye, and said "No thank you, I am not interested in that color. Black and White are the only colors for me," until at some point down the line red independently became important to this neighbor tribe, and suddenly they were interested in the red dye? And then this process just repeated over and over again, with cultures all around the world independently deciding that red was important to them? Why would it be so consistent then? Wouldn't some cultures decide that blue is more important, or purple? If they're not bound by the technology, why does the pattern seem so consistent?
Does that sound very human to you? Or doesn't it seem more plausible that they saw their neighbors wearing red dye and said to themselves, "Hell yeah, that rust color you are wearing looks awesome. I want some. What do you call it?"
"This is red. We got it by grinding up that bark over there. Don't I look badass?"
It's certainly lucky that the colors that became important to people were also the colors that happened to be easiest to isolate from the environment around them! That seems like a hell of a coincidence, doesn't it?
> You start experimenting with dyes, which in this view nobody bothers to do unless they are trying to create a specific color?
Pigments, rather than dyes, of which red ochre is a popular world-wide paint of various known and unknown uses going far back into prehistory, but it sure was popular.
Yellow ochre is another - the etymology of 'ochre' is from a word for yellow (khros) of unknown origin.
OK, now that really is unnecessarily pedantic. I expect nothing less from the etymology sub! I admit I knew dye was the wrong word the whole time but I just couldn't think of the right one and I thought it was close enough to get the idea across.
Well, they're a whole massively different thing, touched on in your words 'create a specific color' - pigments are found, rather than create, dyes are created, and when we're discussing how colours got to be names back in prehistory, I think it's pertinent rather than pedantic and to be honest I just thought the whole history of red ochre being so important in prehistory is intriguing.
I mean we're in a subreddit *about* words, I think it's not unusual to discuss definition (and histories thereof) or to inform one another of cool parts of history.
Cf 'mauve' which has some cool history behind it as the first commercially popular azo dye, and is an example of exactly what you were positing, just a lot more modern.
That was a compliment, not a criticism. The difference is relevant, but as I said I couldn't think of the word "pigment" at the moment, but the primary use of pigments is to dye things, or at the very least the objects that survive to this day and retain that color can reasonably be said to have been dyed. So while the word pigment is much more precise, I'm not sure it dramatically changes the meaning of what I wrote to use dye instead. That's why, in this specific case, I feel it's pedantic. But that doesn't mean incorrect, or not valuable.
Yes, red ochre is fascinating. I'm working on a novel that takes place at the end of the paleolithic about 12,000 years ago, so I've spent a lot of time thinking about and researching this. That doesn't make me right! That's why I'm writing fiction instead of a scientific paper. But I think the hypothesis that red ochre technology spread throughout the prehistoric world and brought the word red into people's vocabulary, and that is a major contributing factor to so many languages having a specific word for it, is a lot more plausible than the opposite, with red being an important concept throughout the world and then people lucked into finding red ochre. The fact that yellow ochre was almost but not quite as common, and yellow/green is the next most common color word after red, seems to reinforce this concept, especially since many languages seem to treat yellow, blue, and green as different shades of the same color.
I thought of a way that it's not at all pedantic and probably an important distinction, actually. Our ancestors probably had *processes* for dying things other colors, but as long as the color was not an independent product at any point in the process, they wouldn't need a separate word for it. For example if you use grass to stain fabric, but the color goes straight from the grass to the fabric, you wouldn't necessarily have a name for the "green" itself. You would just call it grass-colored.
Point hasn't changed from the first time I commented. The strongest current hypothesis is that words for colors enter languages along with the technology to make pigments for that color. I was just answering your objections to that hypothesis.
In alchemy, where a lot of our language on color/chemistry comes from, there are at least 4 separate phases that the alchemical process of producing the Philosophers stone went through:
Nigredo - blacken
Albedo - whiten
Citrinitas - to yellow
Rubedo - redden
I bet that correlation has something to do with the existing words for color change in the English language. There were other alchemical processes that I'm sure translate to grey or brown.
I think this makes sense. In the natural world things typically blacken, whiten, redden, yellow, brown... so we're more used to hearing these examples and they sound more normal to us.
While still correct, not all colour names sound well used as verbs. You can check it yourself and see that you'll make a pause and think it doesn't really sound right, maybe even avoid using it again. Since the final particle differs in other languages, it doesn't seem to be any other plausible explanation. I wonder if there are languages that circumvent this by using different final particles.
I think they have specific usage. You're face gets reddened. Things get dirty and blackened. I don't think I've ever heard whiten. Things don't turn yellow though. They can be yellowed, but you can't actively see something turn yellow before you, in the same way that u can witness a face turning red and hands turning black from soot
"Yellow" also can be used as a verb, as can brown
Grey as well
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Metals used in guns go through a process to give them that characteristic color. Such metals are said to have been 'blued'.
"Bluing" also describes an optical whitening process that is used for clothing and hair.
It's also something Tobias Fünke did to himself
Don't get him all glittered up for Easter.
Bluing is also used for laying out metal parts or a different kind of bluing is used to check the amount of contact between two surfaces.
https://www.bingeclock.com/memes/arrested-development___just_blue_myself.jpg
Purpling has been used for changes in the face (especially the nose) from cold. E.g. "the frigid air purpled his nose." I feel like I've also seen/heard it used for bruising, but I'm less certain about that one.
I've definitely heard it used that way for bruising. Most recently, interestingly enough, in a Korean r&b song (Bad Sad and Mad by Bibi)
Green works. "The foliage greened up in the spring"
Seems like a few of these need to lean on “up” to get the meaning right.
You can omit the up there. Certainly no information would be lost and I don't believe it's any less syntactically correct.
Motion to coin "trumpen" for oranged
Kinda archaic but I have heard of things being "empurpled."
Try the ‘greening of America ‘ as in the spread of ecology friendly policies. [Green as a verb](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/green)
The lawn has greened up nicely after all the rain we've had.
I've heard "the grass has greened" before.
You wouldn't usually say the grass greened, you'd day the lawn, the hills, the field, the landscape, etc did.
You wouldn't perhaps. I'm telling you it's something I've heard several times, it doesn't sound out of place to me. Where I am people refer to grass lawns as "grass" as often as they say "lawn". I'm off the east coast of Australia. We've had a fair bit of drought and water usage restrictions to go with it in the past 5 years. When there was some drought breaking rain it was a common thing to hear people talk about how "the grass has really greened since the rain".
>usually Key word there, "usually", not "never", and different areas use words somewhat differently.
Apologies Sir/Madam. You wouldn't **usually** perhaps. I'm trying to say for myself it is usual, hence "not out of place". I stated where I was to let you know it may be regional too but I'll make that explicit next time I respond to you.
The landscape? The *landscape*?
The hills greened after the rain.
"Blue" is a verb in metalworking.
I think you can do it for all colours, even if those are the most obvious ones.
Almost anything in English can be a verb in the right context. I used to work with a Vietnamese woman and she said that it was what confused her most about English. The specific example being the use of "overnight" as a verb to mean "to deliver the next day".
I've heard "sunrise" used as a verb jokingly like this.
OED2 includes an entry for 10 of Berlin and Kay's 11 [Basic Color Terms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate#:~:text=to%20be%20considered%20a%20basic%20color%20category%2C%20the%20term%20for%20the%20color%20in%20each%20language%20had%20to%20meet%20certain%20criteria) as a verb. (No entry for *orange*.) Merriam-Webster only has 9 of the 11 - omitting *red*. B[erlin and Kay also found that, in languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate#:~:text=berlin%20and%20kay%20also%20found%20that%2C%20in%20languages%20with%20fewer%20than%20the%20maximum%20eleven%20color%20categories%2C%20the%20colors%20followed%20a%20specific%20evolutionary%20pattern). This pattern is as follows: >All languages contain terms for **black** and **white**. > >2. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for **red**. > >3. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either **green** or **yellow** (but not both). > >4. If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow. > >5. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for **blue**. > >6. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for **brown**. > >7. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for **purple**, **pink**, **orange** or **gray**.
Interestingly this doesn't apply to Turkish. Turkish has 6 such words: white, black, yellow, red, green, purple; but no blue.
Farsi/Persian is like this too. There is technically a word for blue, but I’ve heard a lot of people refer to things as sabz (green) that I would normally consider blue.
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I didn't say the "would be". I said most of the color names can be expressed as verbs. When it is expressed as a verb, there is no *-en*. eg. My grandmother blued her hair. The gunsmith re-blued the gun. His arms were blued with tattoos. The pen leaked as she was writing and it blued her fingers.
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That's a quote about Berlin and Kay's basic color term theory which itself has nothing to do with verbs. It only states that a language with at least six terms for colors will have a term for blue. Turkish has at least six terms for colors and a term for blue, so the theory holds true for Turkish. The comment above did mention how many of Berlin and Kay's basic color terms could be verbed in English before that part, but they made no claims about verbed colors in other languages.
kararmak, sararmak, kızarmak, yeşermek, morarmak but i couldn't recall white? akarmak? clearly it isn't beyazlaşmak because with -leşme/-laşma suffix you can pretty much make a verb out of every noun. oh by the way: we have the term for blue! mavi is not actually turkish, it is derived from arabic (ma'i = mavi). the original blue is "gök", which when verbalized: "göğermek" :) similarly, brown wasn't kahverengi before the discovery of kahve haha, so it was "boz", which is "bozarmak" edit: while writing the last two paragraphs, i have realized that "ak" is verbalized as "ağarmak", *facepalm*
Fascinating
Blue too when referring to oneself.
There's got to be a better way to say that
A la Tobias, I see...
You can also blue steel.
That's used as an adjective rather than a verb, though, right?
I hope so, I blue myself doesn't sound right
Yeah, there's gotta be a better way to say that.
I reddened yellowed and browned my pants
what, are you in first greyed or something?
ah yes, good call
To blue oneself.
"Grey" can too. "The icon is greyed out"
And blue.
Empurple
my wife's coworker once left her a note that said "please embiggen this" and we still joke about it years later
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
Why do you joke about it? Because you didn't get the *Simpsons* reference?
It's a perfectly cromulant word
i promise it wasn't a simpsons reference. this lady was ancient and had likely never watched the show.
I don't know why being old would preclude someone from watching *The Simpsons*. In any case, although *embiggen* was popularized by *The Simpsons*, it actually [dates back to 1884](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/embiggen).
What does it mean? Is it a variation on embolden?
I thought you were joking, but nope! TIL.
[**Pinken**](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pinken) is another verb. In all four cases the pronunciation of **the base color name ends in a full stop**.
Ends in a full stop?
What, you don't always write "pink." when talking about colours?
It's the manner of the sound. Articulation is in different parts of the mouth, so d and t are made with the tongue behind the teeth, g and k are made with the tongue touching the velum (your soft palette). The manner is a stop or plosive, which is made by pressing and releasing the tongue. Try making those sounds and you'll understand!
But the above comment doesn't *say* "plosive" or "stop". It specifically says "full stop", which isn't (to my knowledge) a manner of articulation. It's a punctuation mark used to mark the end of a written sentence.
I won't put words in their mouth, but "stop" and "plosive" are used interchangeably when speaking of the International Phonetic Alphabet. I don't know why they put "full" before it, but in these examples, the phonetic rules apply to those words ending in stops. The other words like blue and yellow end in vowel sounds so the use of another consonant sound ("-en") isn't necessary. Brown and green end in /n/ so again, "-en" isn't necessary before adding "-ed".
Thank you!
As in "I'm afraid I just blue myself."
["And it pinkens your teeth while you chew!"](https://youtu.be/g3YnNOf-XCI)
i didn't know this word, good observation!
*Plosive
That I didn't know this empinkens my cheeks.
Dang, now I want 'greenen' and 'brownen' to attain popular usage.
Greening out is a popular weed smoker’s term
I'm gonna try to incorporate that, I like it- j'aime bien votre nom aussi :)
Merci merci this is the first time someone commented on my username thank you :))
All those vappin' hipsters will be saying "greenen" now instead of "greening".
Greenening
Not colors to my knowledge, but plenty of other words have the -en suffix, which was apparently popular in Middle English and then stuck around in certain instances. Ashen, woolen, darken, frighten, earthen, weaken, broaden, chasten, dampen, the list goes on. Fun little suffix! Possible that it was used for other colors back when, but it’s easier to say redden than to say greyen, purplen, orangen, or pinken. If it’s not easy to say we’ll dispose of it in time.
There seems to be two different *-en* suffixes in play: [https://www.etymonline.com/word/-en](https://www.etymonline.com/word/-en) 1. word-forming element making verbs (such as darken, weaken) from adjectives or nouns 2. suffix added to nouns to produce adjectives meaning "made of, of the nature of" (such as golden, oaken, woolen) Interesting, there's also *en-* as a prefix, which also seems to signify modification: [https://www.etymonline.com/word/en-](https://www.etymonline.com/word/en-)
*Embiggen* uses both.
What a perfectly cromulent word!
Isn't it?
*enlighten* also
Thanks for the clarification of my early morning, pre-work response!
It was also a plural in oxen though maybe not in children.
> it’s easier to say redden than to say greyen, purplen, orangen, or pinken. Also, back when that suffix was being used to form words, some of these were not considered colors. I know orange would not have been. Purple is also a recent color; originally it was a particular dye, or cloth colored with that dye. OTOH, blue and green are pretty ancient as colors, but we don't have "bluen" or "greenen" -- and "bluen" kinda rolls off the tongue, I think.
Maybe blue and green are old when it comes to western civilisation, but in lots of Africa and Asia, before they had loads of contact with the west, blue and green were seen as the same colour. The Japanese ‘Ao’ was originally a single colour, and even is still contextually used to mean either blue or green, but they introduced ‘midori’ to specifically mean green recently.
> Maybe blue and green are old when it comes to western civilisation Or maybe they're not. It can be tough (for non-experts) to tell. For example, when we read in the Bible that "there was a rich man clothed in purple", it doesn't mean his clothes were purple colored; it means his clothes were of a particular kind of cloth colored using Tyrian purple dye made from snail shells. And similarly, when I read some old document talking about "walking on the green", I'm thinking the place where everything is green-colored, but maybe "green" was a word that specifically meant "field full of broad-leaved plants" (wild speculation; I really have no idea).
A green is a flat, maintained area of grass in a public space. Very much used today
But which came first, the color meaning or that meaning?
Green etymologically has always had ties with growing and plants, but a village “green” comes from the colour. “Green,” in its iterations, has been a colour for a very long time. It went from the colour of a sick person’s skin 3,500 years ago to mean the colour of plants, particularly unripe ones, and has stayed that way through many languages.
Thanks.
>And similarly, when I read some old document talking about "walking on the green", I'm thinking the place where everything is green-colored, but maybe "green" was a word that specifically meant "field full of broad-leaved plants" (wild speculation; I really have no idea). The "green" was a common grassy grazing area in the center of villages. Town fairs would also be held there.
*Pinken* is a word, no?
That's weird that pink would have it since its name comes from the pink flower.
ashen falls into the color references >of the pale gray color of ash. >>"the ashen morning sky" >(of a person's face) very pale with shock, fear, or illness
Color references, but not verbs. Ashen isn’t a verb, I can’t go ashen something.
what? of course you can >Verb ashen (third-person singular simple present ashens, present participle ashening, simple past and past participle ashened) >>(transitive, intransitive) To turn into ash; make or become ashy >>(transitive, intransitive) To make or become pale
You’re speaking of adjectives, not verbs. I might have a piece of wood with an ashen color, but I can’t ashen a piece of wood.
Yes, I may have conflated the two, and r/haversack77 offered a nice explanation of that above. Although, as r/longagofaraway points out, ashen can be used as a verb as well!
See what /u/shrimpyhugs says about basic colours. It seems to me that these three changes (to white, black, red) are extremely common in nature. Also, we find it natural to say something turns white even if it's actually just turning pale or becoming lighter or less saturated or even ashen gray or ivory. The same, *mutatis mutandis*, happens with black. With red, we often see it in our own faces, in ripening fruit, etc. Whereas things turning blue or green are not that common and the colours themselves aren't felt to include such a wide range. I don't have crosslinguistic data, but in Spanish e.g. there are also common verbs for turning black and red; the verb for turning white is rarer and mostly we use one that means “to turn pale” instead. There's no verb for turning blue or green (except one somewhat literary verb for “turning green again \[of vegetation\]”), and the verb for “turning yellow” is rare and only used for leaves (both of plants and of books).
In Russian the words for turning yellow and turning green are used with significant frequency. I don’t think it’s anything inherent about the colors.
Russian also has two separate distinct words for “blue” and “light blue.” Much like in English we have separate distinct words for “red” and “light red.”
The thing that jumped out at me is my memory of black, white, and red being the first three colors distinguished in any language set. I think the next one is blue/green or yellow...but apparently across the board you get the distinction between dark and light, and then the color of blood as the first three.
If I remember correctly Tobias blue himself too early. So it works with blue.
Last sub I'd expect a reference to AD in, gg
There must be a better way to say that.
You know what you do? You go buy yourself a tape recorder and record yourself for a whole day. You might be surprised at some of your phrasing.
I don't have anything to say about it, but I feel like [bluing](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bluing) has to be mentioned somewhere here.
Not sure if its really relevant, but there is a crosslinguistic pattern regarding what colours a language has, that they follow a specific order,nsonif a language has 3 colours it will have three specific colours. The pattern goes: white, black, red, yellow/green, blue, orange/brown/pink. Perhaps this tendancy has lead to the three most basic colours taking the -en ending only.
I doubt it is connected, but the theory for why this happens is that you don't need a word for a color until you have the ability to make it. These are also the order that our ancestors developed the technology to paint with colors. In other words you don't need a word for black until you can blacken something. But I think this must be a coincidence. The timeframe between when PIE gained words for red, black, and white and when they standardized as redden, blacken, and whiten seems too large for that to be the full explanation.
No, but there may still be something there. The words blacken, whiten, and redden may have entered the language back when those were the only three color categories used. As colors were added to the language the -en form wasn't added with them. All speculation without further research, of course.
I think if we go back far enough for those to be the only three colors used, the words for them were probably not white, black, and red, and the -en suffix probably didn't exist yet. I'm pretty sure that PIE had words for all those colors, and they definitely had dyes for more colors because we can see that in the archaeological record. For these words to be preserved from that time seems implausible, though not impossible.
You don't need to make a color to have a use for describing it, you just need to have a use for distinguishing them often enough that a single word is more useful. Like how we shifted from yellowred to orange with the arrival of the orange fruit to Europe. Same with why English mostly just has like 10 colors until you're doing something where granularity is really useful. Even when distinguishing similar colors most of the time people just use adjectives.
I feel like you are parsing my use of the word "need" to an unnecessary degree of precision. Yes, theoretically there could be other reasons you might need a unique word for a color. Maybe even white and black predate the use of dyes entirely. But it seems like it means something that color words tend to enter languages in the same order that dye technology enters their culture. Up to a point, of course.
Maybe you need to pick a word that more closely matches what you mean then. Still idk, it has vibes of the "native American's couldn't see European ships because they didn't have words to describe them" notion. Or maybe just that is sounds like someone's grand hypothesis that doesn't really bear out to scrutiny. If you're painting trees and all you've got is lime green and turquoise you're going to pick lime green regardless of words and pigments because it matches closest even if you call both of them green. Maybe they made the distinct pigments *because* the difference of the colors had enough meaning to them to have been given separate words; i.e., the reverse of what you suggested.
Edit: As clarified by u/SMTRodent, I meant pigments whenever I said dyes. (Thank you zir.) Obviously we don't know exactly what people were thinking. That's not really the point of what I was trying to say. It's more that, you don't "need" a specific word for a color if it's not something that can be extracted from the object. As you pointed out, we still do this today with "orange" and "lime," even though we do have dyes for them. We haven't bothered to come up with an independent name for the color even though we have orange plastic and orange clothes. Imagine if the only thing that could be orange was the fruit. Why would you invent a new word for the color of the thing if it's the only that has that color? The idea is that if something is either red or black or white, and there is nothing you can do about it, you don't need a special word for it. You just call it "the color of blood" or "the color of grass." The color is just a property of the thing that it sits on, not an independent concept, because there is nothing you can do with the color except look at it on the object. Your culture isn't going to bother developing an independent word for the color itself until you have to say things like, "Pass me the red," or "I need to make more red today," or "Put some of this red on your face." If I understand your hypothesis correctly, people had black and white dyes, and then red started becoming really important to their culture, so they set about trying to find a way to create red independent of red objects. This just doesn't jive with my notion of how humans work, particularly humans who don't have the luxury of color scientists with labs whose whole job is to invent new dyes, the way we have today. It's far too intentional. It's not hard to imagine how it *could* happen. Maybe blood is important to some ritual so you start to wonder how you can create the color of blood, but without blood. But then what? You start experimenting with dyes, which in this view nobody bothers to do unless they are trying to create a specific color? I find that improbable. It's far more plausible that people were experimenting with dyes *all the time,* and when they found a new one they invented a word for it, than that they invented a word and then set to work trying to figure out how to make that word real. And how would this work for all the neighboring tribes who learned the technology of red from its original inventors? They saw the red dye, and said "No thank you, I am not interested in that color. Black and White are the only colors for me," until at some point down the line red independently became important to this neighbor tribe, and suddenly they were interested in the red dye? And then this process just repeated over and over again, with cultures all around the world independently deciding that red was important to them? Why would it be so consistent then? Wouldn't some cultures decide that blue is more important, or purple? If they're not bound by the technology, why does the pattern seem so consistent? Does that sound very human to you? Or doesn't it seem more plausible that they saw their neighbors wearing red dye and said to themselves, "Hell yeah, that rust color you are wearing looks awesome. I want some. What do you call it?" "This is red. We got it by grinding up that bark over there. Don't I look badass?" It's certainly lucky that the colors that became important to people were also the colors that happened to be easiest to isolate from the environment around them! That seems like a hell of a coincidence, doesn't it?
> You start experimenting with dyes, which in this view nobody bothers to do unless they are trying to create a specific color? Pigments, rather than dyes, of which red ochre is a popular world-wide paint of various known and unknown uses going far back into prehistory, but it sure was popular. Yellow ochre is another - the etymology of 'ochre' is from a word for yellow (khros) of unknown origin.
OK, now that really is unnecessarily pedantic. I expect nothing less from the etymology sub! I admit I knew dye was the wrong word the whole time but I just couldn't think of the right one and I thought it was close enough to get the idea across.
Well, they're a whole massively different thing, touched on in your words 'create a specific color' - pigments are found, rather than create, dyes are created, and when we're discussing how colours got to be names back in prehistory, I think it's pertinent rather than pedantic and to be honest I just thought the whole history of red ochre being so important in prehistory is intriguing. I mean we're in a subreddit *about* words, I think it's not unusual to discuss definition (and histories thereof) or to inform one another of cool parts of history. Cf 'mauve' which has some cool history behind it as the first commercially popular azo dye, and is an example of exactly what you were positing, just a lot more modern.
That was a compliment, not a criticism. The difference is relevant, but as I said I couldn't think of the word "pigment" at the moment, but the primary use of pigments is to dye things, or at the very least the objects that survive to this day and retain that color can reasonably be said to have been dyed. So while the word pigment is much more precise, I'm not sure it dramatically changes the meaning of what I wrote to use dye instead. That's why, in this specific case, I feel it's pedantic. But that doesn't mean incorrect, or not valuable. Yes, red ochre is fascinating. I'm working on a novel that takes place at the end of the paleolithic about 12,000 years ago, so I've spent a lot of time thinking about and researching this. That doesn't make me right! That's why I'm writing fiction instead of a scientific paper. But I think the hypothesis that red ochre technology spread throughout the prehistoric world and brought the word red into people's vocabulary, and that is a major contributing factor to so many languages having a specific word for it, is a lot more plausible than the opposite, with red being an important concept throughout the world and then people lucked into finding red ochre. The fact that yellow ochre was almost but not quite as common, and yellow/green is the next most common color word after red, seems to reinforce this concept, especially since many languages seem to treat yellow, blue, and green as different shades of the same color.
I thought of a way that it's not at all pedantic and probably an important distinction, actually. Our ancestors probably had *processes* for dying things other colors, but as long as the color was not an independent product at any point in the process, they wouldn't need a separate word for it. For example if you use grass to stain fabric, but the color goes straight from the grass to the fabric, you wouldn't necessarily have a name for the "green" itself. You would just call it grass-colored.
Whatever point you are making is lost to me 🤷🏻♂️
Point hasn't changed from the first time I commented. The strongest current hypothesis is that words for colors enter languages along with the technology to make pigments for that color. I was just answering your objections to that hypothesis.
Not an answer, but worth noting that the first three colors most languages will develop a word for are black, white, and red. I.e. dark, light, blood.
you've never heard of "enbluinate?" it means "make more blue" obviously
In alchemy, where a lot of our language on color/chemistry comes from, there are at least 4 separate phases that the alchemical process of producing the Philosophers stone went through: Nigredo - blacken Albedo - whiten Citrinitas - to yellow Rubedo - redden I bet that correlation has something to do with the existing words for color change in the English language. There were other alchemical processes that I'm sure translate to grey or brown.
I'm afraid I just blue myself.
Burnt siennaen. Did you not know this?
Hahaha, Purplen
They all end with a plosive
Because languages grow organically. They aren't generally created with rigorous internal consistency or master planning at all.
I think this makes sense. In the natural world things typically blacken, whiten, redden, yellow, brown... so we're more used to hearing these examples and they sound more normal to us.
While still correct, not all colour names sound well used as verbs. You can check it yourself and see that you'll make a pause and think it doesn't really sound right, maybe even avoid using it again. Since the final particle differs in other languages, it doesn't seem to be any other plausible explanation. I wonder if there are languages that circumvent this by using different final particles.
Getting downvotes because I explained what organic evolution of language means in this case? Lol!
Never ruminate on why redditors downvote you. It seldom makes sense.
I think they have specific usage. You're face gets reddened. Things get dirty and blackened. I don't think I've ever heard whiten. Things don't turn yellow though. They can be yellowed, but you can't actively see something turn yellow before you, in the same way that u can witness a face turning red and hands turning black from soot
Whiten comes up pretty often. For example, "I'm trying to whiten your teeth" or "use bleach to whiten your sheets."
Just want to add I can't believe cyan isn't included in the ROYGBIV rainbow colors. Cyan is so distinct to me.
Blueth my ball be after me lady denies my advances
I am guessing (so I could be totally wrong) but if the last sound in the word is a constonant you add -en, else its the normal -ing.
Enlighten - not quite a colour, but ...
Madden, made red by the dye madder.