There’s a joke in Bulgarian somewhat related to that. What’s commonly referred to as a prune plum we call something that roughly translates to “blue plum”. The joke goes something like this:
– Dad, what’s this?
– It’s a blue plum.
– Why is it red?
– Because it’s green.
Language is weird, but it’s ironic that our use of it makes it so.
So, this is kinda weird, but general colors didn’t have names for a long time. Like in Greek texts by Homer he describes the water color as dark wine color because the name “blue” wasn’t a word. So it’s possible when they named a “red onion” purple wasn’t a color and considered a shade of red.
Also as others have said purple was the color of royalty and they didn’t want an association.
It’s kind of wild when you learn that words for blue are relatively new in human language.
In Japanese it’s the reverse; ‘blue’ is used for blue and green; designating green as the different color is relatively recent for them
Huh, so Kentucky isn’t the only place with bluegrass
I started thinking that it kind of makes sense as blue is not a common naturally occurring color and then I remembered the sky.
Yeah, that’s the part I have trouble with. Leaves are green, the sky is blue. They are very different colours. It’s not ambiguous like whether teal or turquoise is green or blue (I could easily see either of those being labelled as either blue or green), or different shades of the same colour like fuscia or maroon. They are different primary colours of light.
It’s just weird to me that two very common every day colours that don’t look anything alike wouldn’t get distinct names. I understand that the blue photoreceptors we have are the newest ones and are less sensitive than the red and green ones, but I wouldn’t have figured that our evolution of it to the point where we see what we currently see (if you aren’t colour blind) would have been that recent. I expected hundreds of thousands of years, not tens of thousands or just thousands, which is what it would need to be to explain cultures that didn’t differentiate between the two until recently.
A lot of old writing refers to the sky and the sea as green.
What color did they say the grass was?
Also green.
That’s funky
There are blue flowers
You mean those green flowers?
-ancient Greek guy (probably)
Cant have pesants eating royal onion now can we?
It wanted to be associated with the proletariat not the ruling class.
Because they are only purple on the inside. Do you think apples are white? Or bananas?
Yeah, but you cannot convince me that watermellons are not red.
Humans are red so why not?
Speak for yourself. I’m more mayonnaise colored
in hungarian it’s purple onion, you just choose the wrong language :)
At least we aren’t hungary all the time
also, take my upvote
in portuguese too
From what I know, it has to do with the word red covering the purple part of the spectrum long ago, and the “need” for the word purple came out later but purple things that were named red didn’t get renamed.
You can look at japanese right now and 青い covers both blue and green, with a relatively recent addition of 緑 to cover only green (thus possibly pushing 青い in the future to be only blue, who knows)
Similarly, the red fox is clearly orange, but English speakers were exposed to that species of fox before developing a word for that specific color. For bonus linguistical oddities, ‘orange’ was used for the fruit before it was used for the color.
And the fruit’s name is different from other countries’ names for it because “a naranj” was misheard as “an orange” and it stuck. Yellow-red wasn’t much adopted, though it did exist. Such is language, what a fun collective hallucination.
Or the red squirrel, which is brown.
And red hair.
The Japanese part of this is evidenced by the fact that some traffic lights are blue rather than green. As far as I know, they are standardizing everything to green now to avoid any confusion, but some older lights are still blue because the words were the same for blue and green.
Well whys it called Shepherds Pie when it doesnt contain shepherds, or Cottage Pie when its nothing to do with cottages or cottagimg? How about that one…checkmate!!!
In Hungary, we have a dessert called madártej, or bird milk. It’s made out of cow milk.
And baby powder is never powdered babies!
I was similarly let down.
Yes, the word for greenery/foliage, 青葉, translates to “blue leaves”
Also the green traffic light is called blue
Because the dry outer skin is a rich red colour
… No? It’s still typically a shade of purple…
McCarthyism
What does that make yellow onions?
I could tell you, but then I would sound racist
If you hold a yellow onion and a white onion side by side, it’s actually yellow(ish)
What really gets me is that the compounds responsible for this hue in food are called “anthocyanins” which means “blue flower.” I can’t even.
why do we call green grapes white
Or purple grapes red?
(I’m guessing due to the type of wine they make)
Don’t even get me started on ‘white’ people.
Meanwhile stupid USians subscribe to the literal 19th-century ‘scientific racism’ theory that has ‘Caucasian people’ as something other than deeply tan skin that Caucasian people actually have.
They also don’t look at the last half of the word too closely.
You mean the word ‘Caucasian‘? Sorry, but that’s probably unrelated to ‘Asia’. Folk etymology is fun, but always falls apart in practice.
Half the Caucasus mountains are in asia.
What Caucasus are you on about?
They mean etymologically. Asians are from Asia, not “Asus”.
So you’re implying that Middle Persian ‘*Kaf kōf’ is halfway the same as Mycenaean Greek 𐀀𐀯𐀹𐀊 ‘a-si-wi-ja’ or /aswijaː/? Do you have any evidence to support your claim?
Who calls green grapes white…?
Never heard that happen
two examples: white wine, white grape juice. both are very common. seems to refer to the juice color, not the color of the grape skins.
when they’re made into raisins, they’re called golden raisins. so “white” isn’t even the only one.
Might be different in other languages, but English usually divides grapes into red and white for color.
In English, grapes are green or red.
Wine is not a grape. White wine and red wine refers to the color of the wine. Nobody calls vodka golden because it came from a potato.
The fuck it does
White Wine
Pink balls
We’re talking about grapes?
That’s only because the wine is whitish. Nobody calls the grapes themselves white. And she squeeze the juice out the juice isn’t the same color as the skin. I’ve never heard anyone refer a grapes as white grapes
Jess and Rob on Words Unraveled talk about color word origins, and their discussion is illuminating about the cultural variance in perception of color. Now I am at peace with all the seemingly weird color names for things.
For a quicker tour, Vox talks about the order that languages fill in color words as cultures begin to refine their distinction.
We call them purple in Spanish… English has brain damage as per usual.
In Spanish we actually call them “cebolla morada” that means purple onion :D
I’m bilingual and I always forget which language calls it which, so I get confused looks from everyone.
JAJAJJAJAJAJJA yep it has happened to me
An orange is about the only thing correctly named
Blueberry 🫐
Am I a fucking joke to you?
They’re pretty purple a lot of the time tho
Wait till they find out that some cultures didn’t have separate words for green and blue