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April 30, 2010 Good article nominee Not listed


I think it would be more correct to have a picture like that in the Blue article. What does everyone else think? Exec. Tassadar (comments, contribs)

"Red gold"[edit]

One of the interesting idiosyncracies of Old English is that the word "red" is frequently used to describe the metal gold. IIRC, the reason for this is that the Anglo-Saxon word for red indicated a slightly different complex of light properties than the modern English word. If this is of interest to anyone working on this article, I can take the time to track down some sources which explain this. -- llywrch (talk) 15:33, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

cf. Colored gold? I seem to recall that the Irish epics (Cu Chulainn, etc.) also make the distinction between "red gold" and "white gold". Choess (talk) 05:56, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
No, not the same thing. It's an example of how the meanings of words have changed between Old English & Modern, similar to how OE dream meant "joy, festivity", but Modern English "dream" means "a sleeping vision". Per Stephen A. Barney, Word-Hoard: An Introduction to Old English Vocabulary (Yale: University Press, 1977), "The terms for colors in OE are confusing to us because the OE spectrum of hues was not divided in quite the same way (e.g., their "red" leaned toward the yellow).... Even more confusing are the numbers of OE color terms which denote, not hue (wavelength), but chroma (reflectivity, brightness, quality of light) or intensity (purity, admixure of white or black, lightness or darkness)." (p. 25) Barney goes on to provide other examples (such as brun which keeps its meaning of "bright, shining" in "burnish", but now as "brown" is defined in terms of hue or intensity, not chroma), then points to 2 further articles under incomplete citations, viz. MLR, vol. 46, & Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 3. -- llywrch (talk) 23:46, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
PS, I just read the first article Barney points to -- L. D. Lerner, "Colour Words in Anglo-Saxon" Modern Language Review, 46 (1951), pp. 246-249 -- & Lerner's aim in his short note is to point that a modern stumbling-block to understanding the OE color vocabulary is that it was far more atuned to brightness than Modern English, which is atuned to chroma. One example he provides is in Beowulf, where "passages such as the description of the monster's lake-dwelling leave an impression of gleaming lights and lowering shadows rather than of reds, yellows or greens." Lerner provides information about brun in this note than he does on red -- so Lerner's note would be more useful for improving Brown than for this article. -- llywrch (talk) 19:18, 1 April 2012 (UTC)
Yes! Add what you can! Wrad (talk) 10:22, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Red for stop?[edit]

Why is red used for the stop signal at traffic lights, etc.? Tabletop (talk) 15:28, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Is there anything off[edit]

Is there anything off about the article, referring to blood as the first color of red? Speling12345 (talk) 7:22, 13 December 2013 (UTC)