Crayolas & peaches

When I was a kid, I used to be obsessed with colours. I memorised all the Crayola colours (favourites: Cerulean Blue & Tangerine) and my favourite books were the ones about differently-coloured vehicles and objects, like The Crimson Tractor. I don't even remember what the story was about actually, I just remember the tractor was red and that was cool (Sorry if I just spoiled the book for any of you).

But I do remember freaking out when I saw Batman on TV - not because of the ridiculously campy villains and the random "POW!" interjections, but I just couldn't believe that people at one point in time didn't know what colour was. While I was eventually told about the relatively recent invention of colour television, It did begin my life-long occasional freak out about my own perception of colour.

I always wondered if the colour I was seeing as red was what everyone else was seeing as red. What if I had this odd rod and cone deficiency that meant that I would see blue instead of red, and no one had told me? What if I saw blood (and everything else this colour) as what everyone saw as blue, but since I was taught that blood was red, I was calling the colour "red" the whole time? Did anyone else freak out about this or was it just me?

Well, with colour being a subjective thing, and no real way to test this out, there's no way to tell if I have a rare, undiagnosed colour-perception deficiency. But I do find it interesting the differences in colour perception just by looking at languages.

I was surprised when learning Japanese about how the terms for orange and pink are orenji and pinku - borrowed from English. The other term for pink was momoiro, or "peach colour". How can something we see as being orangey be pinky in another culture?

Our peaches:
Japanese peaches:
I also found in Japanese that aoi, which translates to "blue" is still used to refer to the colour of the traffic light that means "go", the colour of green apples, and hills. They still have the term midori, which translates to green, but according to Wikipedia, see midori as a type of blue, which is common in other languages too.

While English has 11 basic colour terms (white, red, yellow, green, blue, black, pink, orange, purple, brown & grey), some languages, such as Deni, only have two basic colour terms - one word to mean "any colour that white/red/yellowish" and another to refer to "black/blue/greeny" - It's not that they can't distinguish between orange and yellow (even though the basic colour term would been the same), they just don't. It's a bit like how we have the words maroon and crimson, which we can use when we're trying to be specific, but generally, we'd just use the term red. I guess there's no point distinguishing from midnight blue from cerulean blue if you don't use Crayolas.