Looking back gives us a glimpse at how those early people saw the world around them.

回顧過去，我們可以看到早期的人們是如何看待他們周圍的世界的。

We'll also answer that age old question: which came first orange?

我們還將回答一個古老的問題：

Orange the fruit or orange the color?

是先有橙子這種水果，還是先有橙子這種顏色？

I'm Doctor EricaBrozosky, and this is Otherwords.

我是艾莉卡‧布羅佐斯基博士，這是Otherwords。

The human eye can perceive millions of slight gradations of color.

人眼可以感知數以百萬計的細微色階。

But unless you're a designer or an artist, you probably only regularly use about 10 or so color words.

但除非你是設計師或藝術家，否則你可能只會經常使用 10 個左右的顏色詞。

And they are remarkably similar across all cultures.

而且，它們在所有文化中都非常相似。

A landmark study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay found that people across the world develop their words for colors in more or less the same chronological order.

布倫特-柏林（Brent Berlin）和保羅-凱（Paul Kay）進行的一項具有里程碑意義的研究發現，世界各地的人們是按照大致相同的時間順序來發展他們的顏色詞彙的。

For example, if a language only had two words for colors, they were always black and white.

例如，如果一種語言只有兩個表示顏色的詞，那麼它們總是黑和白。

If a language had only three color words, they were black, white and red. Yellow and green came next in either order, then blue, brown and so on.

如果一種語言只有三個顏色詞，它們是黑、白、紅，接下來是黃、綠，然後是藍、棕，依次類推。

This hierarchy closely matches human psychology.

這種層次結構非常符合人類的心理。

After all, what could be more visually fundamental than the dichotomy between light and darkness and were hardwired to have a strong emotional reaction to red as it has a lot of survival significance from food to sex to violence.

畢竟，還有什麼能比光明與黑暗的對立更具有視覺基礎呢？我們天生就對紅色有強烈的情感反應，因為從食物、性到暴力，紅色都有很多生存意義。

Blue is surprisingly far down the list considering it's most people's favorite color.

考慮到藍色是大多數人最喜歡的顏色，藍色卻出人意料地排在了榜單的末尾。

But actually, due to a chemical quirk blue is very rare in nature, except, of course, for the sky, but you don't really need a word to help identify the sky.

但實際上，由於化學上的特殊性，藍色在自然界中非常罕見，當然天空除外，但你並不需要一個詞來幫助識別天空。

Which sky do you mean? Oh the blue sky.

你說的藍天是指哪片天空？

The English word white can be traced all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European root "kweit-" which meant to shine.

英語單詞 "white "可追溯到原印歐語詞根 "quite"，意為 "閃耀的黑色"。

Black similarly goes back to the PIE "bhleg-" which meant to burn a reference to the color of what's left after burning.

同樣，回到派的黑色，它的意思是指燃燒後剩下的顏色，紅色在這一點上是獨一無二的。

Red is unique and that is the only color that has an PIE root that just meant the same thing, red.

這是唯一一種有 api E 根的顏色，它與紅色的意思相同。

Although it may have been used to describe anything that had a warm or interesting color.

儘管它可能被用來描述任何具有溫暖或有趣顏色的事物，但黃色來自派膠，也意味著閃耀，並給我們帶來了許多相關的詞語，如黃金、微光和閃光 綠色來自派砂，意味著生長，因為它與植物有著明顯的聯繫，也給我們帶來了灰色和草地。

Yellow came from the PIE "ghel-", which also meant to shine and gave us many related words like gold, glimmer glow and gleam.

黃色來自PIE“ghel-”，它也意味著閃耀，並為我們帶來了許多相關的詞，如金色、微光輝光和閃光。

Green comes from the pie"ghre-", which meant to grow for its obvious connections to plants and also gave us grays and grass.

綠色來自“ghre-”，它的意思是生長，因為它與植物有明顯的聯繫，也給了我們草的兩個單詞。

Interestingly, even though humans can perceive more shades of green than any other color, we just use one word for them all.

有趣的是，儘管人類能感知到的綠色比其他任何顏色都要多，但我們卻只用一個詞來表示它們。

Think about it.

想想看

How many different kinds of red can you name compared to different kinds of green.

與不同種類的綠色相比，你能說出多少種不同的紅色。

The reason is probably that even though our ancestors were surrounded by green or rather because they were surrounded by green, it's just not that interesting to us.

原因可能是，儘管我們的祖先被綠色包圍，或者說是因為他們被綠色包圍，但綠色對我們來說並不那麼有趣。

A 2016 study by Hannah J. Haynie and Claire Bower found that humans across many different languages have an easier time communicating warm colors than cool colors.

漢娜哈尼和克萊爾-鮑爾（Claire Bower）發現，人類在使用多種不同語言交流時，暖色調比冷色調更容易溝通。

This color wheel for instance, has twice as many common color words on the warm side than the cool side.

例如，在這個色輪中，暖色一側的常用顏色詞是冷色一側的兩倍。

To understand why, just picture with the world may have looked like to our early ancestors.

要理解為什麼我們早期的祖先眼中的世界可能只是一幅圖畫，在他們的視野中，哪些事物值得談論，是冷色調的還是暖色調的。

Which things in their field of view are worth talking about, the cool colored ones or the warm colored ones?

他們視野中哪些東西值得談論，是冷色的還是暖色的？

Perhaps for this reason, the word blue has been traced back to the PIE root "bhle-" which meant yellow.

也許正是因為這個原因，"blue "一詞被追溯到派的詞根 "blit"，意為黃色。

There simply wasn't a need to describe the color blue until much later on when humans started making dyes and paints from rare materials like lapsi lazuli.

直到很久以後，人類開始用拉巴等稀有材料製作染料和顏料時，才需要對藍色進行描述，萊斯利橙色的出現可謂姍姍來遲。

Orange was pretty late to the scene. The old English term for the color between yellow and red was "geoluhread", which literally meant yellow, red.

介於黃色和紅色之間的顏色的古英語術語是 J Lara，字面意思是黃色、紅色。

But then sometime around the the 15th or 16th century, Portuguese merchants began importing an exotic fruit to Europe known by its Sanskrit name, naranga.

但大約在 15 或 16 世紀，葡萄牙商人開始向歐洲進口一種梵文名稱的奇異水果。

This came to be naranja in Spanish, arancia in Italian and orange in French.

這是用西班牙語、意大利語、橙色和法語寫成的。

The latter two likely dropped the n at the beginning through a confusion about where the article ended.

後兩者很可能是因為搞不清文章結尾的位置而在開頭丟掉了 "n"。

It's the same way we got an apron from a napron and a nickname from an ekename.

就像我們從圍裙得到圍裙，從 EK 的名字得到暱稱一樣。

Over the next couple 100 years, people went from saying things were orange colored or the color of an orange to just saying they were orange.

在接下來的幾百年裡，人們從說東西是橙色的或橙子的顏色變成了只說它們是橙色的。

So there you have it, the fruit came first.

就這樣，水果先出現，但我們仍然要承受長期以來沒有一個合適的顏色名稱所帶來的影響。

But we're still living with the effects of not having a proper name for the color for a long time.

但長期以來，我們仍然生活在沒有正確的顏色名稱的影響之中。

It's why this is called a redhead and this a Red Robin, even though they're both clearly the color of an orange.

這就是為什麼這個被稱為紅頭髮，這個被稱為紅羅賓，儘管它們都很明顯，但橙棕色的顏色來自派熊，意思是明亮，可能是指打磨過的木頭。

Brown comes from the PIE "bher-", which meant bright, possibly in the sense of polished wood.

棕色來自 PIE“bher-”，意思是明亮的，可能是拋光木材的意思。

Indeed, it also gives us the word burnished.

事實上，它還為我們提供了 "燒焦"（burnished）一詞。

The animal that we today call a bear went by a totally different word prior to the middle ages.

我們今天所說的熊，在中世紀之前有一個完全不同的詞。

But since it was considered dangerous to even mention the fearsome beast by name, ancient hunters came up with a euphemism "bero" which meant brown one.

但由於提到這種可怕野獸的名字都會被認為是危險的，所以古代獵人想出了一種委婉的說法，即 "barrow"，意思是棕色的野獸。

They were so superstitious. In fact that the true old English word for bear is now lost to history.

他們太迷信了。事實上，"熊 "的真正古英語單詞現已消失在歷史長河中。

Purple is one of the few common color words without a PIE root.

紫色是為數不多的沒有 api E 詞根的常用顏色詞之一。

It comes from the Latin "purpura," which referred to a certain shellfish that was ground down to make a distinctly colored dye.

它源於拉丁語 Papua，指的是一種貝類，這種貝類被磨碎後可以製成一種顏色鮮明的染料。

Because of its vibrance and rarity, purple became very popular with the wealthy and powerful and is still associated with royalty today.

因為紫色鮮豔而稀有，所以深受富豪和權貴的青睞，至今仍與皇室貴族聯繫在一起。

It wasn't really until humans became proficient artists that we started adding colors or vocabulary by the hundreds.

直到人類成為精通藝術的藝術家，我們才真正開始添加顏色或詞彙，數量多達數百種。

Most are either based on the source of the pigment, like stones, plants and insects or to what the color reminds us of whether it's the sky, the birds or a beverage.

其中大多數是基於顏料的來源，如石頭、植物和昆蟲，或者是基於顏色讓我們聯想到什麼，如天空、鳥兒或飲料。

So how many unique color names are there?

那麼，有多少獨特的顏色名稱呢？

It's hard to say, but it's definitely in the hundreds, if not thousands.

很難說，但肯定有上百種，甚至上千種，有些歷史悠久，可以追溯到人類文明之初。

Some have long histories dating back to the beginning of civilization and some were made up recently by crayon marketing departments.

有些則是蠟筆的營銷部門最近編造出來的。

You may not need more than 10 or so on a day to day basis.

您每天可能不需要超過 10 個左右。

But the explosion of words shows that color has gone from something that we just used to survive to an integral part of expressing ourselves and making our imaginations a reality.

但是，文字的爆炸性增長表明，色彩已經從我們只是為了生存而使用的東西，變成了表達自我和實現想象不可或缺的一部分。