What is the origin of the particular names given to particular colours? Why is 'red' called RED in English, or ROUGE in French and so on? Could 'red' have been called anything in English eg. GREEN or some word totally unconnected with colour discrimination, such as TALL?

Perhaps strange-sounding questions but colours must have been named in some way; the use of the name RED must have become prevalent in English for some reason. Certainly there is no evidence that at any stage any Government prescribed that the indefinable and undescribable colour 'red' should in future be known as RED.

One way of exploring the relation of a particular colour and the name applied to it is available if one uses the system of speech-sound/gesture correlation set out in The Physical Foundation of Language. If that system is applied, then associated with each combination of speech-sounds forming the name of a colour there must be a specific gesture-contour, arm-position or movement. One can examine what relation, if any, there is between the gestures associated with the words naming the major colours.

The major colours (following Berlin & Kay 1969) are taken as WHITE BLACK GREEN YELLOW BLUE RED ORANGE. Other than BLACK and WHITE, these are the distinct colours seen in the visible spectrum, though in the spectrum each colour merges into the next and it is to some extent arbitrary at which precise point one finds the particular major colour.

One would expect that, in terms of the arm-gestures associated with them, contrasting colours would give the clearest indication of whether or not there is any systematic relation between the set of colours and the set of associated gestures. Hence, it seems appropriate to start with WHITE and BLACK.

For WHITE, the initial speech-sound is W (which is included in the Lateral group of speech-sounds,that is, it involves a substantial movement of the arm from one side to the other). In fact, if one uses both arms for the gesture, the gesture associated with the sounds forming WHITE (W AI T)is a spreading apart of both arms (almost in the kind of gesture associated with Welcoming someone) with the palms of the hands turned upwards, on a level somewhat below shoulder-level. More precisely, for the author the distance between the fingertips of the two hands in making the associated gesture is about 3 feet ie. a wide opening of the arms, but not going beyond the point at which the stretching of the arms out to the side is effortless and involves no strain. Not surprisingly (in view of the similarity of the speech-sounds involved) the associated gesture is very similar to that associated with the word WIDE (W AI D), except that for WHITE the hands are at a somewhat higher level and for WIDE the palms of the hands are more nearly horizontal. If one compares the gesture for WHITE with that for another word, SIDE (S AI D), again the two gestures are similar but, as one would expect, the arms are not spread out so far to the side for SIDE as they are for WHITE (or for WIDE).

From these comparisons with gestures for other words containing similar sound-elements, the gesture for WHITE appears to be totally consistent with the general system of sound/gesture relationships described in The Physical Foundation of Language.

The next step is similarly to examine the arm-gesture associated with the contrasting colour BLACK (B L A C). Again using both arms, one finds that the gesture associated with BLACK, starting from the arm-position standard for B as an element in the Main Consonantal group, ends with both arms placed in front of the body, bent sharply at the elbows, the two hands facing each other, palm to palm, about 2" apart, with the fingers pointing upwards, and the hands positioned a few inches in front of the chin and mouth. The contrast between the position for WHITE, with the arms wide open, and that for BLACK, with the arms and hands very close together, is striking. If one first tries the gesture associated with WHITE and then follows it immediately with the gesture associated with BLACK, one finds that the gesture for BLACK automatically results from the bending of the forearms at the elbow, that is: the positions of the elbows seems to be the same for both BLACK and WHITE and the contrast between the associated gestures results from a 90 degree change in the angle of the forearm.

In the same way as one compared the gesture for WHITE with that for WIDE, one can compare the gesture for BLACK with that for a word including similar speech-sound elements BLOCK (B L O C). The gesture associated with BLOCK is found to be virtually identical with that for BLACK except that for BLOCK the position of the hands is a little further forward than for BLACK i.e. the angle of the forearm on the elbow is slightly greater for BLOCK than it is for BLACK.

As a first trial, the comparison of the gestures for WHITE and BLACK seems satisfactory. One finds a sharp contrast - in effect, one could say that the gesture for BLACK is the opposite, visually, of that for WHITE - and one could in fact readily use these contrasted gestures as items in a sign-language to distinguish between BLACK and WHITE.

The contrast of WHITE and BLACK is no doubt the sharpest between any two colours. The next stage is to extend the examination of associated arm-gestures to the other major colours. Of these, the most salient is normally considered to be RED (a colour available in the colour repertoire of 'primitive' languages with even the most restricted set of colour-names).

In the same way as for WHITE and BLACK, one can observe the arm-gesture which ought to be associated with RED. Again using both arms, one finds that the pattern of the gesture for RED resembles that already found for BLACK, with the arms bent in front of the body, the palms of the hands facing each other. The main difference from the arm/hand positions for BLACK is that for RED the hands are a few inches further away from the face and the distance between the hands is about twice as great as that between the palms of the hands for BLACK. One other fairly small difference is that the fingers are pointing slightly forward and upwards (not straight up as for BLACK). It seems obvious that the position of the hands and arms for RED is one intermediate between the positions of the hands and arms for WHITE and BLACK. The forearms are bent on the elbows slightly less for RED than they are for BLACK. (Interestingly, the position of the hands for RED is similar to that in which the hands would be held in reading a book).

Proceeding in a similar way, one can examine next the arm-gesture associated with the word GREEN, usually contrasted with RED. The pattern of the relation between colour-name and arm-hand position in the associated gesture is now becoming apparent. For GREEN, the positions of the arms and hands resemble those for RED except that, in the same way as RED differed in several respects from BLACK, so the positions for GREEN differ in several similar respects from those for RED. That is, the distance between the palms of the hands is greater (now nearly 1 foot), the hands are further away from the face than for RED, the arms are bent slightly less at the elbows. GREEN also appears to be associated with arm/hand positions on the curve between the positions for WHITE and BLACK.

The contrast visually between RED and GREEN is a sharp one. The visual contrast between BLUE and GREEN is much less definite and it is therefore of interest to see how great the difference may be between the arm-gesture associated with GREEN and that associated with BLUE.

For BLUE, the arm-gesture is found to be intermediate between that for BLACK and that for RED, that is, the arm/hand position for BLUE is nearer to the face, with the palms of the hands closer together and the elbows bent more sharply than for RED. Perhaps this is not surprising. The sound-elements in the words BLUE and BLACK are to some extent the same (B L A C and B L UU); the effect of the long U in BLUE as compared with BLACK is that the hands are raised a little higher than the position for BLACK, even though they are a little further away from the face. The gesture for BLUE fits directly on the curve of the movement of the hands and arms from the positions for BLACK to the positions for WHITE RED and GREEN.

Of the major colours listed at the beginning of this note, this leaves YELLOW and ORANGE. YELLOW as a colour is sharply distinguished from the others (except perhaps from GREEN with which it has many transitional shades). The arm-gesture for YELLOW can be examined in the same way as those for the other colours already dealt with. On examination, using the gesture/sound relationships in The Physical Foundation of Language, the hand/arm positions for YELLOW are found to resemble most closely those for WHITE; the arms are spread wide apart (the distance between the fingertips is almost as large as that between the fingertips for WHITE, almost 3 feet). The palms are turned nearly facing upwards but the hands are higher than the positions for WHITE, above the levels of the shoulders out to the side; the forearms are bent much less on the elbows than for RED but not as little as for WHITE. The hand/arm positions for YELLOW again seem clearly to lie on the curve produced by moving the hands and arms from the positions for WHITE to those for BLACK. It is rather illuminating to compare the arm-positions for YELLOW with those for YARD (Y AA D); the positions for YARD are very close indeed to those for YELLOW but the hands are placed a little lower down than for YELLOW; the distance between the fingertips with the arms in the positions for YARD is about 3 feet.

This leaves ORANGE, a colour-name not available in the lexicon of a number of languages. It is however apparent as a distinct colour in the spectrum. As an intermediate colour between RED and YELLOW, it is of interest to see what positions of the arms/hands are associated with the sound-elements in the word ORANGE (O R A N ZH). On examination, one finds that for ORANGE, the positions of the hands and arms are more or less precisely at the midpoints between the positions of the arms/hands for RED and YELLOW. It begins to look as though there is some direct quantitative relation between the colours and the positions of the arms/hands associated with the names given to the colours.

For the range of colours dealt with so far, the arm/hand positions run from WHITE through YELLOW then ORANGE then GREEN then RED then BLUE then BLACK. This order does not coincide with that given by the variation in the frequency of the colours in the spectrum. The order in the spectrum goes from DARK RED through ORANGE then YELLOW then GREEN then BLUE then INDIGO, The main difference in order is that in the spectrum RED and BLUE are at opposite ends but in the arm/hand positions RED and BLUE are close to each other and close to BLACK, that is, the order for the hand/arm positions seems to run rather from DARK to BRIGHT (with each of the colours ordered in terms of comparative brightness) rather than from LOWER to HIGHER light frequencies. Physiological analysis of colour (if this is what the arm/hand positions reflect) thus seems to be different from physical (instrumental) analysis of colour. This is of course the case. The eye perceives colour as the result of a complicated process quite different from direct perception of differences in the frequency of light in the spectrum. The eye has three separate mechanisms for reacting to the colour of light, with a capacity to respond sharply to three distinct colour-frequency centres, the RED BLUE and GREEN ranges, the 3-colour basis of vision. A mixture (addition) of light in the three ranges, RED BLUE and GREEN, acts in combination to produce a subjective experience of WHITE. The addition of RED and GREEN light produces the perception of YELLOW. The addition of YELLOW and BLUE light (that is, again in effect the addition of RED GREEN and BLUE) produces WHITE.

The systematic pattern of arm/hand positions associated with colour-names seems much more easily relatable to this physiological account of colour perception than to the physical analysis of colour in terms of light-frequency only. It perhaps would be less surprising to assume that the addition of RED BLUE and GREEN lights to produce WHITE results in the addition of the stimuli for the associated arm/hand movements and positions to produce the arm/hand positions for WHITE. Complementary colours are defined as coloured lights which added together produce a sensation of WHITE, so in this sense YELLOW and BLUE are complementary. The complementary colours for RED and GREEN respectively are less familiar: for RED the complementary colour is called CYAN (the colour produced by adding GREEN and BLUE) and for GREEN the complementary colour is MAGENTA (produced by adding RED and BLUE). In terms of the arm/hand position system described in this note, one would expect the complementary of any colour to represent the difference in stimulus between the arm-position produced by the given colour and the arm/hand position produced by WHITE light, that is, at some point differences in the frequency of light perceived are converted into differences in the degree of contraction of muscles controlling the positions of the arms and hands. (NB: the arm/hand positions for the colour names VIOLET and INDIGO appear to be between those for BLUE and those for BLACK).

Colour names in French and Basque

But how far does the systematic relation found to exist between the names of colours in English and the arm/hand positions associated with the speech-sounds forming the names also exist in the case of the names for colours in other languages?

As the most familiar, one can take the parallel set of colour-names in French, NOIR BLANC ROUGE VERT BLEU JAUNE ORANGE.

For NOIR, using the system of speech-sound/gesture relations from The Physical Foundation of Language already used for English, the result of the sound-elements in NOIR (N W AA) is a final position of the arms and hands exactly the same as for English BLACK but arrived at by a different route (in terms of intermediate arm and hand positions) from that producing the arm/hand positions for BLACK. The final position, as for BLACK, has the hands close together, palm facing palm, in front of the mouth and chin, a few inches apart.

The arm/hand positions and movement produced by BLANC are very similar to those produced by WHITE: the arms/hands start from the same position as there is initially for BLUE and BLACK and move outwards to the same final position as for WHITE, the movement out apparently being the result of the combination of L (as a sound from the Circular group) with the nasalised vowel AN which reinforces the outward-turning movement. The arm/hand position produced by BLANC is very similar to that produced by LONG (in French).

The next French colour-name is ROUGE, with the sound-elements R UU ZH. This produces exactly the same final arm/hand positions as for RED, the only difference seeming to be that after the initial position is produced by R, the second sound in French UU produces a small upward movement of the two hands followed by a small forward movement resulting from ZH whereas in English after the initial R the sound E produces a small forward movement followed by a small upward movement resulting from the sound D.

From the sounds in French VERT (V EE), the arm/hand positions resulting are the same as for GREEN, with the forward movement produced by the V and the upward movement by the long vowel EE.

French BLEU is obviously in sound close to English BLUE and it is not surprising that the associated hand/arm positions are very similar for the words in both languages.

French JAUNE with the speech-sound elements ZH ØØ N produces a final position close to English YELLOW with a forward movement contributed by the ZH, an upward movement by the long vowel ØØ and an outward turning of the hands by the final N.

The arm/hand position associated with French ORANGE is similar to that for English ORANGE, the only difference between the two being in the second vowel sound.

The conclusion is that in French the systematic relation between colour-names and the arm/hand positions associated with the sound-elements forming the names is exactly the same as in English. From this one can draw the further very important conclusion that, regardless of language, perception of the major colours appears to be associated with particular positions and movements of the arms/hands (ie. with the central control of the muscular apparatus of the arms and hands). If we see a particular colour, there appears to be as a side-effect (perhaps more than a side-effect?) an associated specific patterning of the muscles of the hands and arms.

It could be said that English and French are languages long in contact with one another with similar names for many of the colours (BLUE RED ORANGE) and that the coincidence between the gestures and the colour-name sets may be particular rather than universal. To test this one can go on to examine the set of colour-names in a language completely unrelated to French or English, namely Basque. In Basque, the names for the set of major colours are:

BELTZ (Black)
ZURI (White)
GORRI (Red)
FERDE (Green)
URDIN (Blue)
HORI (Yellow)
LIRANJA (Orange)

If one uses the English set of speech-sound/gesture relations for each of these Basque words, one can see how far the systematic relationship found in French and English seems to exist also in this remote language.

The gesture resulting from BELTZ (B E L T S) using the system of The Physical Foundation of Language is that the hands are placed close together (a few inches apart) in front of the body but at a level much lower than is produced by BLACK or NOIR (in fact in front of the abdomen). In an earlier note, it was pointed out that Basque is one of the 'deviant' languages in terms of the internal mind/brain reference-point to which speech-sounds are referred and that for Basque the reference-point is translocated to a position at the back of the head, opposite to the central forward position (immediately behind the centre of the forehead) used for English and most other languages. It is not surprising then that if one uses the central reference-point for the Basque word for BLACK, the arm/hand positions are very substantially displaced.

If one goes on to try the other Basque colour-names, one finds a similar displacement for each of them. The arm/hand positions associated with GORRI (Red) are close to those for BELTZ (Black) but much lower than those for English RED. The same is the case for FERDE (Green) URDIN (Blue) and LIRANJA (Orange). Interestingly the arm/hand positions for HORI (Yellow) and ZURI (White) are closer to those for the corresponding English colour-names, though lower down.

All this is easily explained if one uses for the Basque words the appropriate internal reference-point at the back of the head instead of the forward central reference-point used for English. With this translocation, the speech-sound elements in the Basque words produce exactly the same arm/hand positions as for the corresponding English and French colour-names.

It seems unavoidable that there is a systematic relation between colour-perception, colour-naming and arm/hand positions, which is almost certainly universal in its application and will operate to produce preferentially certain patterns of speech-sounds to form the names of colours in different languages. In any language any combination of speech-sounds will do to name a colour provided that the arm/hand positions and movements associated with the speech-sounds going to form the colour-name will when combined together produce the same final arm/hand positions as have been observed in the case of the English colour-names. There may be a very large number of different routes by which the final arm/hand positions are arrived at - in the same way as there may be a very large number of routes to travel from London to Edinburgh - but the final destination is the same.

If this is so, then the way is opened for speculation, and perhaps research, about the neurological relation between colour perception and colour-discrimination on the one hand and neural motor control (neuromuscular signal patterning) on the other. This finding also retroactively casts light on the discussion in an earlier paper of the extent to which over a very large number of languages there seems to be an objectively observable tendency for a restricted number of colour-names to be used for the different colours with many resemblances between the forms of the colour-names in widely separated languages.