I'm afraid I can't find the link at the moment, but there was a post on Language Log some time ago about how the basic colors are always the same in all languages. What I mean by that, is that if a language has words for only 3 colors, those colors will always be red, black and white (this is from memory, but I'm pretty sure that's it). If the language has 6 words for colors, they will also be the same colors. So there are many variations on details, but somehow there is a basic pattern that is more or less language-independent.
Michel Pastoureau is a French specialist of the history of colors, and his book on
Blue has been translated to English. It's very interesting to see that many things we take for granted and universal about colors are not at all universal. Even the scientific facts about colors are, to an extent, conventions. Newton identified 7 colors in the rainbow, but the 7th (is that indigo?) is rather doubtful and he may have added it to arrive at the symbolically significant number of 7. Also, the three primary colors we know are cyan, magenta and yellow, but in fact there are other combinations of three colors that you can combine to obtain all the colors we see. TV and computer screens, of course, use red, green and blue.
Sorry, that was a bit off topic. Should we have a thread about colors?
