> > the non-blue meanings have other names (gwyrdd/llwyd) which means that
> > in modern everyday usage glas tends to have a specifically blue sense.
> >
> > I think it is fairly recent:  coch has certainly drifted away from
> > meaning `brown' (these days borrowed directly from English) in about
> > two generations.  My grandmother always talked about `bara coch'
> > (brown bread, now literally red bread), but I don't know that anyone
> > does any more.  At least, I don't know anyone that does any more.
> >
>
> Nefi bliw!
>
> Suddenly several things have got a lot clearer - thanks Geraint.
> I found it hard to believe that there was no original word for
> 'brown' in Welsh. Does this mean that there were only a few 'colour'
> words in the language - 'coch' for reddy/brown end of the spectrum,
> melyn for the yellowy bits and glas for the rest? I believe the human
> eye can distinguish several million shades of colour, and it's
> obviously impossible to name them all, but isn't three cutting it a
> bit short?
>
> I always worried about the Welsh sense of colour with ideas such as
> 'glaswellt' for grass - it always looks green to me. And given that
> the Welsh seem to own herds of goats coloured variously pinc, piws,
> coch, streips etc, in addition to the usual du, gwen etc, you do have
> to wonder.
>
> The comment about coch also makes sense in the context of beer: I
> believe that cwrw coch is 'Mild' and 'cwrw melyn' is bitter - not
> lager as you might think. There are other words for lager I'm sure,
> most of which involve the waste products of various insects or
> animals.
>
> Nigel (ncallaghan@cix.compulink.co.uk)
>
>

actually, while the human eye can *distinguish* many colors, the
numbers that the human tongue cares to name can vary widely.  there
seems to be a definite "evolution" in the number of color names that
occur in a language:  the oldest and most basic are black, white,
and red (du, gwyn, a coch)--dark, bright, and blood-colored. then it
seems to progress to names for the colors of the sea and sky (most of
the meanings of glas), flowers that aren't blood-colored or sea-
colored (melyn) and then people become more and more refined until you
reach the stage of the Tweeds catalog (a mail-order clothing company
in the U.S.) where you can buy t-shirts in "persimmon," "sea foam,"
"sea shell," "eucalyptus," and other high-falutin' shades.  there are
several studies in linguistic anthropology about this kind of thing.

leslie jones
jones@humnet.ucla.edu