Caveat.  This is not to promote Sapir-Whorf hypocrisy.

The former animal appears in Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and the latter creature in one of the detective stories of Agatha Christie.  The fictional nature of the two sources has long misled me as to what colour exactly the rabbit’s eyes and the cat are.  The follows are how eyes with Japanese preconditionings see the world.

1. Pink eyes.  It seems that this loquacious rabbit is an average when it comes to his eyes.  What colour?  Red, of course.  But how can one refer to something red by saying pink (please look at his ears)?

2. Orange cat.  This was more outrageous since I came across orange cats in every three page or so.  "How can England produce so many cats with satsuma-coloured hair?" was my frustration.  It turned out that Christie was writing about mundane cats with what I call tawny brown hair.  This gets the meaning very straight.  But again, how come she said orange?

I would appreciate any comments on this rambling,
Fulgent flaminius

Flaminius, please tell us what colour you would translate the Japanese word ao as.

Agatha Christie was writing about tabby cats. AS you can see from this site, many are distinctly orange rather than tawny brown.

My personal opinion on the pink eyes is that literary red eyes imply the demonic, especially if the eyes are glowing. Lewis Carroll may have employed pink eyes to soften that image, or perhaps to further underscore the skewed otherworldliness of his story. However, an Oryctolagus cuniculus expert may be out there…

His Fulgency the Flam mentioned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis at the top of the thread. He also said something about how ‘eyes with Japanese preconditioning see the world’.

I’m looking forward to him telling us about the Japanese colour ao.

Different languages describe colours with different words, and they often don’t match up completely. For instance, in Welsh the colour of a rain cloud, the sea, a blade of grass and the top left of the US flag is the same glas - just in different shades. My Welsh dictionary, rather unhelpfully, translates glas as ‘blue, green grey’. If you look up the colour gwyrdd you get ‘green’, and even gwyrddlas as ‘verdant’. If you described the grass as gwyrdd you’d be wrong, it’s glas. Even if it is glas gwyrddlas!

- Garzo.

[quote author=Garzo link=board=idiom;num=1087831879;start=0#4 date=06/21/04 at 19:36:03]His Fulgency the Flam

This is a joke for the "orange cat."  Since orenji (orange) in Japanese is a very narrow band in colour spectrum that houses bright thick yellow of satsumas, californian oranges, etc.  Gailr’s examples are all "brown cats" (in differing brightness and thickness, of course) if I would decsribe them.

I’m looking forward to him telling us about the Japanese colour ao.

From your direct question I gather you know the answer from the start.  But let’s have a try if I could augment something new.

Ao is the colour of sky, sea (blue), forest, weeds (verdurous), and (Garzo must be nodding with expectation) one of the lamps on traffic lights (green).  There is a time-honoured word for green, but midori may have been started its life as a subdivision of ao.  Today it can refer to dark green of forests, trifle-yellowish green of green tea, thin green of new leaves, and pale green of traffic lights (the last may be the result of too many of foreign scoffao-s ashaming "green" traffic lights).  I must admit that traffic lights look greener ever since they have started switching them to light-emitting diodes in Tokyo, but even they have noticeable bluish air.

Have chromatic fun,
Flaminius

Thanks Flam!

I always had an idea that Japanese ao is very similar to Welsh glas. I often use the semantic field of colour words in different languages as one example of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It is surprising how subjective colour really is, and how often I hear the response ‘well surely green is always green’!

My source book is the rather fun Basic color terms by Berlin and Kay. It describes ao as being translatable into the English ‘green’, ‘blue’ and ‘pale’. It also says that Russian has two blues - sinij (‘dark blue’) and goluboj (‘light blue’). You might say that English has got three reds in scarlet, crimson and red, but they are all reds. Russian considers sinij and goluboj as distinct as English considers yellow and green distinct.

Chromochaotic!  :D

- Garzo.

[quote author=KatyBr link=board=idiom;num=1087831879;start=0#6 date=06/21/04 at 20:19:53]
Ah Flambouant, orange has a much looser definition, and so does pink in English, a bright pink can be almost a cherry red, orange is any brown with yellow predominant.

But oc, you did know that…. :o

KT

No, I didn’t.  So thanx.  Unless one is in the cat or designing business, one doesn’t very often talk about pink-eyed rabbits and orange cats in a foreign language.  I had some fragmentary knowledge but wanted to upgrate it something more complete.

I have just realised that imported words generally have a limited range of meaning and colour terms are no exceptions.  I have mentioned orenji is a loan, and so is pinku.  Even midori is not exempt from foreign influence.  An example is the secondary formation of the word for "green tea," which hithertofore had been referred to simply as cha, or "tea."

[quote author=Garzo link=board=idiom;num=1087831879;start=0#7 date=06/21/04 at 20:38:38]My source book is the rather fun Basic color terms by Berlin and Kay. It describes ao as being translatable into the English ‘green’, ‘blue’ and ‘pale’. It also says that Russian has two blues - sinij (‘dark blue’) and goluboj (‘light blue’). You might say that English has got three reds in scarlet, crimson and red, but they are all reds. Russian considers sinij and goluboj as distinct as English considers yellow and green distinct.

Chromochaotic!  :D

- Garzo.

Hebrew has three terms for blue according to Eliezer ben-Yehuda’s dictionary.  This is a bit different from what I have heard from native speakers.  I will check and report it.  Chromochaotic indeed.

[glow=blue,0,300]Does anyone else see this thread inching [/glow][glow=turquoise,0,300]towards the treacherous waters of Greece[/glow][glow=green,0,300](whatever color they are!)?[/glow]

[Language and Colors]  ::)

Trap shut make KT clap, yes?

If a Japanese person was presented with a sixty-four crayon pack and asked to pick the crayon that best illustrated ao, which crayon would be chosen? I would imagine it would be a primary colour. An first language English speaker when asked to choose the crayon most indicative of red would choose the ‘fire-engine red’.

Blue is my favourite colour in English…I must be a dreamer…

Evidently I haven’t yet learned all the does and don’ts of camera handling.