Perception of colour

 

I have a pair of leather Mary Jane shoes that I would call green — “emerald” on a chart I’ve just looked up on google.  

    This pair of shoes would look green when I wore them with a(n azure/sky) blue dress, but blue when I wore them with a(n avocado) green T-shirt.

    Student Amelia (not her real name, Singaporean, aged 80) called the sweater I was wearing when I went to deliver her fruit and veg on Friday “mauve”, whilst I think of it as “reddish brown”.  Another student Ruby (not her real name, British, aged 71) said “deep pink”, and friend Vernon (not his real name, Italian, aged 67) calls it “purple” — I sent them a photo of it, so it could be the light.

    I mention the above people’s places of origin and age for a reason:

• different cultures have different ways of seeing and describing colours (see below for “brown”); 
• age might also play a part — either because that was how those colours were perceived during their childhood days (i.e., modern times might now have new words for those same colours); or eyesight deteriorating with age affects the outcome.

    I have had episodes of identifying colours differently from other people:  what I’d say was green, they’d say was blue; and vice versa.

    So, is it me, or is it them?  How does one prove which party is right in labelling a particular colour?  

    These questions have been floating in my head since the 80s when I first became aware of the discrepancy between how I see colours and how others see them.  

    I suppose the test is for each party to look at a particular object, then match them to a colour on a colour chart, and see if they end up identifying the same colour.

    This reminds me of brown:  I was teaching colours to a batch of evening class students one year.  Got a bit stuck when it came to brown, apart from 巧克力色 qiǎokèlì sè / “chocolate colour” and 咖啡色 kāfēi sè / “coffee colour” — which in themselves cause a problem:  dark chocolate or milky?; coffee with milk or not?

    There are two standard/overall words for “brown” in Chinese: 褐色 hè sè, and 棕色 zōng sè. 

 

    褐 hè is coarse cloth, therefore undyed, therefore brown — it’s more dark brown than light/pale brown. Googling it produces a description of 黄黑色 huáng hēi sè / “yellow black colour”.

    棕 zōng is palm tree/fibre, therefore not as dark as 褐, I’d say.  Googling it nets the description of “anywhere between red and yellow”, so 棕色 for brown is definitely on the lighter side — it has “red” whilst 褐色 has “black”.  Yellow is the element common to both.

    Looked up my hard copy dictionary as soon as I got home from that lesson back in 1985 (no internet).  My discoveries:

1. English “brown bread” = 黑面包 hēi miànbāo / “black bread” (presumably the first time the Chinese saw dark bread was pumpernickel, which is darker than our now-common brown bread)
2. English “brown cow” = 黄牛 huáng niú / “yellow cow” (also = a tout)
3. English “brown dog” = 黄狗 huáng gǒu / “yellow dog”
4. English “brown sugar” = 红糖 hóng táng / “red sugar” (in my S.E.Chinese dialect Teochew, it’s “ou tng” / 乌糖 wū táng / “black sugar”)
5. English “brown [leather] shoes” = 红皮鞋 hóng pí xié / “red skin/hide shoe”

    The above list of the Chinese words for the English “brown” shows that the Chinese versions are not a constant, but vary along the black–yellow–red scale.  

(I’ve arranged the examples with yellow, the common denominator (to 褐色 and 棕色), in the middle (yellow cow and yellow dog), to make it easier to see it straddling the two extremes.)

    This is what I mean about “cultural perspective” when I gave the places of origin of Amelia (Singapore), Ruby (England) and Vernon (Italy).  I think their varying descriptions of my sweater (which I call reddish brown) might also be due to cultural perspective.  

    Only problem is:  Amelia is from Singapore, like me; she’s from the Teochew dialect group, like me; she’s only nine years older, so she’s in the same age group.  Yet she calls it “mauve” and I call it “reddish brown”….  Back to the drawing board.