Colors are gonna be that way since they're a social construct that varies between cultures. Pink is just viewed as "light red" in a lot of languages so yeah you're gonna get a loanword.
Actually the etymology of color words is super interesting. Usually each language starts with specific colors in a specific order (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, White, Black) then they evolve from there. I've read a couple articles on it and it was entertaining.
Sorry should have explained that better. Old japanese used ao for both blue and green. Refering to green specifically during the heian period they used the word "ryokushoku" 緑色 (which retroactively became midoriiro later)
The word midori used to mean something like sprout or bud and only became the word for the color green later.
What i wanted to say is that the color green was "imported" from Chinese and most people said blue instead (people still say "blue traffic light", "blue leaves", "blue apple" etc)
In Chinese they historically said 青 qīng for both blue and green too, until the early 20th century. 綠 meant leafy in Chinese and only meant green by analogy until fairly recently.
People generally didn’t differentiate between blue and green in Chinese until modern times.
I know orange in English was named after the fruit; do you recall anything similarly interesting in other languages like how a particular color came to be named?
I was reading about how different cultures view colours (wish I could remember the article it was really good) and my random tidbit of knowledge I give is; Japanese traffic lights have the most blue leaning green but still green enough to count for international road standards.
Yeah, historically (before the heian period (794-1185)) they used ao to describe all the nature colors and cool colors which included blue and green and only later decided that there should be more distinction between them.
Though even to this day ao is still used in the words for green apples, the green light in stop lights and several other things.
This happened in English too as recently as the 1500s, albeit not using a loanword. There was no word for the colour orange, it was considered a shade of red (hence why a lot of orange things today are referred to as "red", like red foxes, red hair, etc). It would generally be called "orange-red", specifically in reference to the fruit, aka, "it's red like an orange". Then eventually people just dropped the "red" part and people started thinking of orange as its own unique colour category.
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u/Lloyd_lyle 9h ago
Colors are gonna be that way since they're a social construct that varies between cultures. Pink is just viewed as "light red" in a lot of languages so yeah you're gonna get a loanword.