On the origin of the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ for International Colour Day
Most languages recognise multiple colours, and many acknowledge a hierarchy and name them in the same order
To mark International Colour Day on March 21, try imagining a world without banana yellow or leafy green, aqua sky (the Pantone 2003 colour of the year) or living coral (this year’s winner) – what a drab place it would be.
Of the many colour systems, the one that is most widely used – Pantone – has 1,114 colours. When it comes to basic colour terms – single-word, high-frequency names – most natural languages have between two and 11: Alaskan Yup’ik has five, English 11 and Italian 12. Regardless of culture and language, though, there is a hierarchy – the majority of cultures recognised and named colours in the same order – which matches human reaction to different frequencies in the visible spectrum, with more salient reactions recognised earlier, such as that to the contrast between dark and light.
The first two basic colour terms in any language comprise one encompassing “black” and dark hues, and the other covering “white” and lightcolours. The third term is almost always centred on red; the fourth and fifth would be yellow and green, then blue and brown, after which terms for orange, pink, purple and grey develop, in no particular order.
The origins of the basic colour terms can be found in the earliest languages. In English, “black” comes from the Old English blæc (“absolutely dark”, “absorbing all light”, “colour of soot or coal”), descending from the Proto-Germanic blakaz (“burned”; source of other Germanic words such as Swedish bläck [“ink”] and the Dutch blaken [“to burn”]), from the Proto-Indo-European bhleg (“to burn”, “to gleam”). The association of blackness with burnt material is also seen in a completely different family: in the Australian Aboriginal Yandruwandha language, tyimpa means “black” and is related to a word meaning “ashes”.
The Proto-Indo-European root bhlegalso evolved along another line of meaning into the Proto-Germanic blankaz (“bright”, “shining”, “blinding”, “white”), becoming in Frankish blank (“bright”, “white”). This was borrowed into Late/ Vulgar Latin as blancus (“white”), becoming the Italian bianco, French blanc, Spanish blanco and Portuguese branco. We find this element in English, too – “blank”, which entered the language in the early 13th century from the Old French blanc.
It was another Proto-Indo-European root, kweit (“to shine”), that developed into the Proto-Germanic hweit, then into the Old English hwit (“bright”, “radiant”, “clear”, “fair”), giving English “white”.
This International Colour Day – March 21 is when the equinox (from the Latin aequus [“equal”] and nox [“night”]), with its balance of light and darkness, takes place – let us revel in seeing the world in more than just black and white.
