mother tree

[corvi]

Yesterday juli  and I went to an Artists' Garage Sale, where she convinced me to by some surplus Intensely Blue Paper being sold by a letterpress shop that I guess hadn't found a lot of use for All That Blueness Oh No So Blue.

I made a three-layer papercut. The layers don't actually match up very well, but I'm happy with it anyway, probably because all that Blue is affecting my cognitive function.  Need to solve the technical problem of how to transfer a design to multiple sheets. The answer is not "chalk dust," I have learned.

This is sort of the "mother tree" juli  and I half-glimpsed driving along Lake Baikal in Siberia in the middle of the night, racing to the Russian border before our visas expired. I didn't get a good look at it, just a quick impression of wind-twisted limbs almost hidden under dozens of blue silk prayer scarves. So I just make up what it looks like when I feel like depicting it.

The Mongolian language recognizes two separate colors, цэнхэр and хѳх, both described by the word "blue" in English, which I think is pretty neat. This one is хѳх.

For the past several months, I  have been working on convincing my brain that  "light blue" and "dark blue" are two separate colors, no more related than blue and green, the way a Mongolian would conceive of them. I'm very curious about how difficult this is, as an example of "language shapes thought," and how flexible brains are about that sort of thing.

Convincing Myself There Is No Such Color As Blue: I have weird hobbies.

Comments

[thnidu]

Russian also distinguishes these, as синий (dark blue) and голубой (light blue; ? from голубь 'dove').

[corvi]

Does голубой also include grey? I know language usually isn't that logical, but I'm curious. :)

[thnidu]

Apparently not. Translations I've seen are blue, azure, light blue, sky blue, aqua. For gray in Russian, Google Translate lists серый, седой, пасмурный, мрачный, сумрачный, бледный.

In English we speak of "dove-gray", which I associate with the mourning dovehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mourning_dove. But

In general, the terms "dove" and "pigeon" are used somewhat interchangeably. … In ornithological practice, "dove" tends to be used for smaller species and "pigeon" for larger ones, but this is in no way consistently applied, and historically, the common names for these birds involve a great deal of variation between the terms. The species most commonly referred to as "pigeon" is the feral rock pigeon, common in many cities. (Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbidae)

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the meaning of голубой derives from the pigeon, aka rock dove:

The Rock Dove (Columba livia) or Rock Pigeon, is a member of the bird family Columbidae (doves and pigeons). In common usage, this bird is often simply referred to as the "pigeon". … Wild Rock Doves are pale grey with two black bars on each wing, although domestic and feral pigeons are very variable in colour and pattern. … It has a dark bluish-gray head, neck, and chest with glossy yellowish, greenish, and reddish-purple iridescence along its neck and wing feathers. (YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBDzpi0ikiU )

Respectfully submitted, Dr. Whom: Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody

[spiralsheep]

I like your tree. It reminds me of the well dressing near here at the beginning of May.

no more related than blue and green

In Welsh "blue" and "green" are covered by the same word. This is very convenient because of the tendency of water and distant hills/mountain to change colour between "blue" and "green" depending on the weather.

[tylik]

It's also pretty common, linguistically. In Chinese the old word is qing*, meaning some kind of blue or green natural colors, and the newer words are lan and lu (with an umlaut). But they don't carry the sense of coolness than qing does. Like, if you're talking about a dragon, it'd definitately be a qing dragon, because hey, dragon.

* Aaaaah! This last upgrade messed up ibus, and now it isn't offerring me the right characters, WTF? Also, the character selection panel is popping up at the bottom left corner of the screen... This after ibus broke chromium.

[spiralsheep]

That's interesting, although dragons in Wales are more traditionally red, hee! And I probably should have mentioned that the Welsh word "glas" covers all the usually shades of water (and distant hills seen through changing weather) so it includes greys in those contexts too, although grey also has its own word (e.g. for animals and sometimes rock &c).

English is an odd language because despite having an extremely large potential choice of words, due to having shamelessly stolen so many from other languages, we don't have a monolexemic word for dark blue (blue originally meant lighter blue) while many languages do distinguish light and dark blues with a single word each.

[corvi]

Do you know about the blue / green situation in Kazakh?

[corvi]

Oooo, now I am seized with the sudden urge to put flower petals inside out wasp-infested wellhouse. Er, maybe not. *shudders at wasps*

[spiralsheep]

There's a light-hearted discussion on our most popular national radio station right now about whether people should dress their taps or not, heh, with requests for photos from anyone who does it.

Gorgeous!

[dialecticdreamer]

Coming at this from an amateur's viewpoint, I thought the layering was deliberate.

The effect is still very, very attractive, and I like the slight mismatch.

But thinking about it from a technical viewpoint, do you have a plain metal stylus? Trace the layering from A onto B onto C via slightly compressed paper-- in practice, the stylus can make slightly 'shiny' lines, and is a bit more noticeable on textured paper than plain, but if tracing from the obverse, it also makes the line less visible. Play with it; it's fun for its own sake-- and I think you could rapidly turn "fun" into art.

[clare_dragonfly]

Wow, that is beautiful. (Here via ysabetwordsmith.)

[corvi]

Thank you!

[ivy]

I like the way that that comes off as shaped by an invisible wind. Did you freehand it? It definitely has that tree-on-a-bluff shape to me!

[twoeleven]

What you said.

[lotsofplants]

I'm confused. Why is the solution to "get blue where you want it" not "cut white paper where you want black, put black paper underneath & secure edges so they move together, cut black paper where you want blue, put blue on the bottom, secure & frame"?

If you want to mentally split colors, I'd advise getting a nice continuously graduated color wheel and draw some non-traditional lines. :)