What about the RHS color charts? They have been more helpful to me than
any verbal descriptions.
Shirley Meneice
Pacific Rim wrote:
>Jane McGary wrote:
>
>
>
>>I wonder if a multilingual horticultural color term chart would be useful
>>to many people?
>>
>>
>
>I can't say that it would be useful to me across the board -- I read only a
>few languages -- but it would be stimulating to see how many other languages
>and cultures describe colors.
>
>William Stearn, in his book, Botanical Latin, presents a lot of Latin color
>terms with English equivalents -- useful in principle for all of us who
>refer to the Latin names of plants, though it is not clear to me that
>contemporary plant descriptions written in Latin are Stearnly latinate;even
>dead languages evolve, it seems. Nonetheless perhaps the Stearn list of
>plant colors could be used as a start.
>
>Color and language, both, fascinate me.
>
>Color: The primary colors from ground pigments differ from the primary
>colors of light; Jane, as both a photographer and an editor of printed
>documents, might wish to expand on this. Or not. I am jumping in to this
>conversation with no hope of further participation for several days.
>
>Language: It appears from encounters I've had, and texts that I've read,
>that blue and red are virtually one in Chinese. We divide the spectrum in
>different ways.
>
>Language: I frequently smile on noticing the variance, in English, of
>certain color descriptions from the things they purport to refer to.
>
>Flesh pink -- is not the pink of any human but a lurid, Band-aid,
>Barbie-doll medium cadmium orange + white
>
>Cerise (cherry) -- is more like printer's violet
>
>Violet -- is mauve with perhaps a little black in it
>
>Peach -- describes no earthly peach, but Flesh pink + white
>
>Apricot ditto.
>
>Pistachio -- is a softer, more greyed green than the bright yellow-green of
>the nut
>
>And so on.
>
>In haste,
>
>Paige Woodward
>on top of Chilliwack Mountain
>in southwest British Columbia
>Canada
>wet Zone 6
>http://www.hillkeep.ca/
>paige@hillkeep.ca
>
>
>
>
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