> Regardless which are the reasons which are brought to say there was not
> colour name in PIE it sounds doubtfully.
> It is simply seems to be very hard to say there was no name for colours.
Alas, it must be true. Colour words in Latin Greek and Sanskrit are
notorious!
(a) There are surprisingly few of them, and most that do exist are taken
from objects, such "sky" or "mud".
(b) The ones that are inherited are exactly in line with what we see in
other cultures: Cultures with two colour words have black/white; with
three they are black/white/red with four either black/white/red/yellow or
black/white/red/green - but in all of these cultures the meaning of the
colour word is extended beyond its range in English. So it is in Latin,
Greek and Sanskrit.
(c) The range of the colour words in Latin Greek and Sanskrit is so
extreme and bizarre that some of them at least cannot have referred only to
the hue. For example, purple snow, green horse.
(d) There is no definite proof that the Romans or Greeks could perceive
Blue as Blue. They probably could, but nothing in their literature or
painting proves it. (Blue is significant because it is at the far end of
the perceived spectrum, beyond the frequency of the colour perceptors in the
retina.)
We also know that colour perception is cultural! Yes, our eyes are the
same, but the way we construct the world, and classify things is not. And
we learn from our culture how to label colours.
Peter