Color terms (was Alstroemeria key)

We've done some favorite colored bulbs topic of the week this year and it
has been interesting that some of the colors overlap. A couple of plants
were selected by different people as representing different colors. This
could be a perceptual thing or perhaps the same species does show variation
in the color of the flowers.

I still want to do purple and blue favorites (which I definitely thinK are
different). There are some blue flowers and some flowers that photograph
blue with a digital camera that are really purple. At least I don't think
all those gorgeous blue Crocuses probably are purple. Correct me if I am
wrong. I find it interesting that the purple flowers turn out blue since
before digital so often blue flowers photographed pink. I find it really
hard often to capture purple with our digital camera. Many of the Babiana
pictures I took last year I never added to the wiki, because I couldn't
capture the right color.

Perhaps we could do a five favorite purple bulbs as a topic of the week and
then in a couple weeks do blue and see what people come up with.

Mary Sue

At 09:26 AM 9/18/04 -0700, you wrote:

Many thanks to Jamie Vande for elucidating a section of German color
terminology:

As to ROT, it is generic. In German, the colour descriptions are a bit
different; ROSA is pale pink, PINK is deep pink (in the purple range). Many
colours that are perceived as red are quite warm. I think that BLASSROT
would be a warm, medium pink to most, while HELLROT would be like cadmium
pale, in artists colours, sort of scarlet, like a Pelargonium. DUNKELROT
would be like a very ripe tomato, while KIRSCHROT would be a deep, cold,
crimson.

This is the kind of information one never gets from classroom language
study or reading works on history and other non-artistic subjects. Color
terminology is such a complex subject across languages that it forms a
special area of study for linguists. For example, a wide set of languages
around the world don't distinguish 'blue' from 'green'. 'Red' is another
area where there is a good deal of complexity. Linguists have also studied
what kinds of distinctions different groups of people within a language
community make; for example, women tend to use more different color terms
than men do (though male horticulturists and artists would know more than
the average woman, of course).

I wonder if a multilingual horticultural color term chart would be useful
to many people? I could probably design a questionnaire on which to base
one, but it would require a sample of a certain size (at least ten
respondents, I think) for each language. It would be interesting just to
see, within a language, what different people call the color of a certain
flower. The present discussion related to Worsleya offers an example: Is
it 'blue'? I think "blue" is used more loosely in English than the
equivalent color terms in some other European languages -- that is, it
seems to extend more into the purple range in English. Or is that just
horticultural wishful thinking?

The existence of widely grown clones and species with little color
variation offers gardeners an opportunity to define what they call a color
from samples other than expensive color charts (which may not reproduce
well over the Internet). Thus, you could elicit your local color term for
'yellow' (the single quotes indicate a gloss, or meaning; double quotes
are a word-as-word) by referring to Sternbergia lutea. 'Yellow' is easy;
what flowers are 'purple', though?

This subject is of great practical interest to me as an editor of
botanical and horticultural writing. I tend to cringe a little, for
instance, when an author describes a flower as "mauve," one of the most
ill-defined English color terms.

Jane McGary
Northwestern Oregon, USA

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