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