Published on 12, July, 2020
Did you know that the word for the colour orange comes from the fruit, not the other way round? https://www.omniglot.com/bloggle/?p=14856Our name for the fruit comes from the Sanskrit for the name of the tree. Other languages name the fruit after the Portuguese who traded it, or after the Chinese who first cultivated it.
I'd heard that about orange before, but not about blue. It makes me wonder how what we call colour is a sort of mutual agreement? When you're a child, someone tells you that the grass is green and the sky blue and you just accept it, but is it really true?
Especially because everyone sees colours slightly differently, even more so for colour blind people.
I've a friend with quite serious colour blindness, whereas I have very good colour vision, we used to argue a lot about what colours things were, he's say something like 'that shade of grey really suits you' and I'd say 'but I'm wearing green!' Going to a paint shop or a plant shop with him is infuriating for both of us, if he can tell the colour then he can't see the shades properly, it's dark blue, mid blue and pale blue at best, at worst its just one shade, pretty much everything else is grey.
Another one that both confuses and fascinates me is the ph and F they have the same sound but ph is of Greek derivation and F Latin, why? Whats the difference between fantasy and phantasy? How do we choose which to use or know which is the correct spelling when we come across that word?
I think the British accents were more like what we would now call a deep south accent. I think tv has played a big role in how we speak, many people speak "estuary English" a sort of extreme east south/eat London accent, we've also picked up that annoying habit of making everything we say sound like a question from watching Australian soaps.
In the medieval period someone from Yorkshire wouldn't of understood or been understood by someone from Devon as the accents, pronunciation and dialect would have been so different. Mind you I'm amazed at how poor so many people seem to be at accents now, why is a Geordie accent so hard for people to understand?
We were always told to use colours that most colour blind people could see the difference, or use patterns so it was clear what represented what. I remember one of the geography exams had different maps to print out if you were colourblind
When I was at school I had two classmates who were colour blind. One was red-green blind, and the other boy had the rarer purple-brown version. In geography we sometimes had to colour in maps, and I was the one who selected the colours for them and acted as referee. They found the whole thing rather pointless as they could not actually differentiate the colours they put on their maps!
British accents are really interesting to study as they changed so much over time!!! Everyone’s accents used to be so different depending on location, way more so than today. I’m pretty sure people started adopting the London accent as standard while travelling became more common and more people migrated. I don’t think they sounded exactly like Americans do today as there are many American accents that have changed and developed over time since then, but British accents were certainly different/stronger compared to today’s!
I wonder if stanardised spelling compounded an existing problem along with recieved pronunciation. Apparently the Tudors sounded more American than English, what do Shakeperian scholars make of that I wonder?
That’s so interesting, I’d never made the connection to songs before! I learnt about it when doing Chaucer at school, which has similar problems with rhyming but we didn’t spend very long on it
The great vowel shift if fascinating. I have heard of this before. I think it explains why some classic church hymns have seemingly terrible rhyming choices.
I think the thing about spelling is mainly an English language problem, as so many of our words are taken from different cultures and languages over the years including German and French. Some of those words stem from Greek, others stem from Latin! Also, the great vowel shift affected how we pronounce words but we didn’t change the spellings (for example ‘head’ used to be pronounced ‘heed’ but then shifted to ‘hed’ but the spelling stayed the same).