Whoa d00d, teH K0L0RZ....

[wombat1138]

I was tidying up some earlier entries by tucking them into lj-cuts, and got caught up again in webhunting stuff on color linguistics as related to two different palettes of metaphysical elements:

Asian quincunx: earth, wood, fire, and metal, and water

Western quartet: fire, air, water, and earth
(sometimes this set also quincunxes with the central addition of spirit.)

From this point on, forget about the metaphysical stuff. You may have noticed I changed my virtual crayon for "water" between the two lists, which I rearranged into the chromatic order given in an older post:

[...] while the water serpent (or sometimes another dragon) of the east is usually referred to as "blue" these days, the cosmology is old enough to predate the separation of "blue" and "green" from the primordial sea of "grue"-- according to the usual theory of linguistic color concepts, the first two categories are always black and white (or more properly, dark and light), followed by what we'd consider "real" colors: first red, then yellow and grue in either order, after which grue resolves into blue and green before other color terms emerge. (Technically, the original Chinese character for "grue" was shifted to "blue" by the eventual addition of "green", but the chromatic borderline may be a bit odd in Japan, where traffic signals may seem ambiguously turquoise to visitors from overseas.)

If I correctly understand some of my justnow web reading, the Japanese linguistic palette is also considered anomalous for having acquired murasaki before separating midori from aoi. Mandarin Chinese has a stronger separation between blue and green, but also acquired purple earlier than the Berlin/Kay statistic hierarchy would predict. And my main point has just fallen out of the back of my brain cell, but had something to do with the observation that languages tend to divide a certain subpalette into either blue/green or dark/grue, with the latter set tending to originate from regions with high UV exposure, which would gradually degrade vision by inducing a yellowish tinge within the lens.

Comments

[sff-corgi.livejournal.com]

Doesn't the Greek also provide the source word for 'glaucoma', though? How'd that go from Athene to blindness?

I think the genetic markers might come from the ancientness of both groups, although Goddess knows that the Celts have become such a hodge-podge; there still manages to be Celtic genotypes, though, faces that make my brain ring like bagpipes, 'That person MUST be a Celt!'

[wanders after linkage]

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

The etymology for "glaucoma" seems to originate from diagnostic lumping-together with the cloudy lens seen in cataracts-- which latter condition seems to've been originally called "portcullis" (http://www.word-detective.com/032404.html) (last item on page), of all things.