Japanese Colors

One of my favorite parts of learning a new language is the chance to consider how other people think about the world differently than English speakers based on their language. As I learn Japanese, there have been a number of moments when this really rang true, but the strongest so far happened last night when my host brother introduced me to colors.

My Japanese textbook has a list of twelve colors, and some of them like orenji and pinku clearly derive from English words. Due to this, I thought Japanese had a limited number of colors in their vocabulary, but au contraire! My Japanese textbook could not list them all so it utterly simplified them instead since there are dozens of names for the hues that we fit into about a dozen categories in English. My host brother reported there are more than 700 colors in Japanese!! This may have been a slight exagerration, but there are definitely many many multitudes of the comparably few we regularly use in English.

This made me think about how Japanese people literally see the world. Surely if we knew 700 (or even 100!) names for colors we would see more distinctions between objects. I tried to explain this to my host mom and brother by using the example of being in the park near their house: if I could describe all of the different hues in the trees, bushes, grass, etc, then I figure I would see each as more separate from one another than I do currently by grouping them all under the single heading of green.

My host mom was interested in this hypothesis and she took out a book called "Beautiful Birds". Turning through the pages she pointed to various plumes and named their colors. My host brother disagreed with some of her choices and would interject different words, which began to reveal one of the difficulties of having so many colors as there are bound to be different interpretations. I was completely amazed by all of the words they knew for colors and how some birds that I though saw as yellow were actually at least five different colors in their eyes.

Oh, the wonders of language!

For a list of some Japanese colors, look here: http://www.hi-ho.ne.jp/douton/htmlcolor.html