Re: Odp: Odp: Odp: Color Words - purple

From: Marc Verhaegen
Message: 333
Date: 1999-11-23

Piotr, thank you very much for this extensive explanation --Marc
... Modern English BLUE (which is a loanword from French).    
Is it? French "bleu" is a loanword from Franconian (Dutch "blauw"), as are
several other color names (French<Dutch): bleu<blauw, blond<blond,
blanc<blank, brun<bruin, gris<grijs. Germanic "bl-" seems to have meant
something like "without colour": black, blond, blind, blue...    Marc
It is, despite the fact that the word is ultimately Germanic, as you correctly point out. So are many other French words that were borrowed into English in the Middle Ages (e.g. guard, while ward continues OE weard 'guardian').    Piotr
 
Then French bleu replaced OE blâw?     Marc
No, it didn't--and it couldn't, since OE *blāw did not exist. It is a ghost word haunting etymological dictionaries (at least those whose authors do not check their sources carefully) but never found in any OE text. It was conjecturally recionstructed by A. H. Smith (or perhaps some earlier author) as an element of English place-names and a hypothetical OE cognate of ON blár etc. Since then it has been abandoned by experts but continues to live a life of its own.
 
Old English had the following "bluish" terms:
 
blǣwen 'dark blue' (of dyes and textiles)
glæsen 'shiny pale grey/blue'
wǣden 'blue/indigo' (dyes, textiles; a descriptive term = the colour of woad dye)
hǣwen 'blue/grey', also in compounds like hǣwengrene 'blue-green', swearthǣwen  'dark blue', blǣhǣwen 'dark blue/violet/grey' (of textiles).
 
Of these adjectives, only hǣwen can be regarded as a developing basic colour term in OE. Its career was prematurely truncated in Middle English times when it was replaced by Old French bleu (ME bleu, blew(e), bliu, blo, etc.) as a basic colour term meaning 'blue' (also partly covering the 'violet/purple' range). It remains to be added that "blue" terms are surprisingly rare in OE; even hǣwen has a total of 64 occurrences in the whole OE corpus. It isn't mentioned EVEN ONCE in Beowulf.
 
The following book is a mine of information on such matters:
C. P. Biggam (1997). Blue in Old English: An Interdisciplinary Semantic Study. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi.
It is based on Biggam's doctoral thesis and is so good that I hope the author (a woman; women are naturally more competent as students of colour) will soon cover the rest of the visible spectrum as well.
 
Outside Old English there are of course various Germanic "blau" words. They found their way as loanwords not only to Old French but also to Mediaeval Latin (blavum 'woad blue') and other languages of Europe. Polish bławat (now archaic) 'blue-dyed silk' and bławatek 'cornflower, Centaurea cyanus' belong here too.
 
Piotr