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Unread 04-16-2018, 03:16 AM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Those others are just me to this point. I have an academic friend who speaks fluent Welsh, and I'm not sure I've ever asked him his take on this claim. The word would probably be glas. Here's a thread from The Guardian:

"The Celtic spectrum was different to the one the Western world is now used to, and based on the quality of a hue rather than its wavelength. So "llwyd" can mean brown (paper), blue (mould) or grey (rabbit); "glas" can mean blue (sky), green (grass), grey (horse) or transparent (saliva); "coch" can mean brown (sugar) or red (meat) and so on. There are learned papers on this "spectrum overlap", which is present in the traditions of Scotland and Ireland also."

Garry, Llangwyllog Wales

And here's Wikipedia:

"The Welsh word glas is usually translated as "blue"; however, it can also refer, variously, to the color of the sea, of grass, or of silver. [...] In traditional Welsh (and related languages), glas could refer to certain shades of green and grey as well as blue [...] however, modern Welsh is tending toward the 11-color Western scheme, restricting glas to blue and using gwyrdd for green, llwyd for grey and brown for brown."

All this to say, ask and it shall be given. I *am* in academia; but I have to say, the fact that a single Indo-European root gave us basic words for both white (blanc) and black seems worth discovering to me. It's a good reason to have academics, and I have no regrets about posting it here.

Cheers,
John
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