COLORS

The color of brown sugar is red. The color of salted egg is red. If you darken a rice cake it becomes red. The enemy of the white cock is red. Tagalog seems to have such an unhealthy obsession with red (asukal na pula, itlog na pula, putong pula, sa pula / sa puti) that our forefathers forgot to name the rest of the colors.

Filipinos do not have an easy time translating English colors into Tagalog. A few colors are easy: white, black and our all-time favorite, red. Three other colors: yellow, green and blue come quickly too. But good luck translating orange, purple, brown and grey which either requires finding obscure (to us, at least) Spanish words or a creative use of random things: dalandan, ube, tsokolate and abo.

The fact is that languages develop words for colors over a long period of time. Most ancient tongues have words for black and white. Red comes next likely because it is the color of blood and one of the simplest dyes to make. Yellow comes after as it is the color of flowers. Tagalog seems to have stopped there.

We shouldn’t feel blue about this as most civilizations never even saw blue until the modern times. There is no mention of blue in Homer, ancient Chinese texts, the Koran, the Hebrew bible. Except for the sky, nature doesn’t really use the color blue, so it was never important for people to point this out. And if you can’t describe it, you don’t actually perceive it. Scientists have conducted experiments showing that people have a hard time perceiving differences in colors — until a word is made for it. And to think blue is now the world’s favorite color. (Google blue+Homer to see this mind-blowing experiment.)

For early Tagalog-speakers, the sugar or egg that wasn’t white must have been another color. And to them, red was as good a description as any.