It was also within the range of reds that they learned early on to diversify the palette and to produce varied tones and shades, as the oldest known color terms demonstrate.
For thousands of years in the West, red was the only color worthy of that name, the only true color. As much on the historical as hierarchical level, it exceeded all others. ( ① )
Not that they did not exist, but they had to wait a long time before they were considered colors and then played a comparable role in material culture, social codes, and systems of thought. ( ② )
It was with red that humans did their first color experiments, achieved their first successes, and then constructed a chromatic universe. ( ③ )
Here the lexicon seems in keeping with pictorial practices and coloring techniques. ( ④ )
In certain languages, the same word can mean “red”
or simply “colored,”
depending on the context, such as coloratus in classical Latin or colorado in modern Castilian. ( ⑤ )
In other languages, the words meaning “red”
and “beautiful”
share a common root;
for example, that is the case in Russian, in which the terms krasnyy (red)
and krasivy (beautiful)
belong to the same lexical family. * hierarchical: 위계의 ** chromatic: 색채의 *** lexicon: 어휘 목록
