Our comic of the month for October is Ventura City Drifters. Discuss it with other forumites here!
The blue-green tree, as opposed to what, the purple tree? Most trees, bushes, grasses, plants, are blue-green. If you want to point out a particular tree, you would probably be better off with other descriptors than a basic colour term it shares with most other trees.
At what point in the evolution of a language do those "basic" color terms actually appear? I can easily imagine a nascent language making do for a long while with just the names of the objects thus colored, rather than creating terms for an abstraction of its color.
I wonder if that's not the beginning of abstract language; and perhaps even of abstract thinking -- the concept that one can separate the color from the thing colored, and consider the color as a thing in itself.
I doubt that that would be its beginning, honestly. The way humans need to cooperate, I'd wager that they may have had a concept of "us" - their group, abstract from its current members, which change over time - before other abstract language constructs. Possibly before language, period, as there's no shortage of social species that don't have one (by the standards of John Current-Day Doe).
The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power—upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes.
That’s just the point, isn’t it? You and I don’t have exact words for a jillion shades of green, yet if you go outside and compare the leaves of almost any tree of different species, they are all green but not exactly the same color. People dependent on the distinctions between plant species for survival might well come up with a lot more nuanced definition of different colors or shades within what we would call “green”. As research has shown they do, although nowadays it’s harder to research because almost all peoples have had at least some influence from other languages.
Plants don't stay the same shade of green at all growth stages of the plant, or at growth stages of individual leaves. Look hard at almost any green plant, at any time of year: you'll see more than one color there on the same plant, never mind different plants of the same species. We just don't usually look that hard.
Here’s some Finnish word nerding (I came across this in comments for Chapter 3 of Adventure 1 so this might be a repost)It’s interesting at least to me as a native Finn. I didn’t know Finnish has verb classes etc. I mean I would probably understood we do if I had given it some thought but. I still don’t know how many an what determines them http://borealexpat.blogspot.com/2014/08/deconstructing-finnish.html
