colours?

[Is it hot?]

who decided the name of colours e.g. why is red called red and not something else??

[Quizmonster]

'Red' is called 'red' because it came from the Old English word 'read' and that is related to the Germanic word 'rot' which, in turn, is connected to a similar Old Teutonic word and so on. In ancient Greek, the word 'erythros' still shows the 'r' followed by 't' sequence of sounds. Even in Old Irish, the equivalent word was 'ruadh'.
So, you can trace this - or any other basic word - back as far as you like, but you will never discover why the very first grunting early man decided on the sounds he did.

[Quizmonster]

Of course, more modern colours are more easily explained, being named after actual things. In the following list, for example, the century-dates labelled 'i' refer to the very first recorded use of the name of the thing in English and those labelled 'ii' the first use of the word as a colour.
a. Orange.........(i) 1300s...(ii) 1600s
b. Lime.............(i) 1600s...(ii) 1800s
c. Pistachio......(i) 1500s...(ii) 1700s
d. Turquoise.. .(i) 1300s...(ii) 1800s

Of course, that still leaves us with...But where did the names of the things come from? And there we are, back where we started!

[Peter Pedant]

Excellent q Is it hot

Colours - how do we know that erythros is the red we know it.

well we dont, remember that Homer talked of the wine-dark sea, and the sea over there is never the colour of wine

Rosy fingered dawn, also Homer (porphyrodaktylos) is tho.

and do colour names change ?

yup, You know the Red Cow down the road ? You know where the gurz get bevy-ed up and take their clothes off ? Were cows eva red ? Red was brown in Victorian times and only sort of got red, when decent carmine dyes were invented in the late 1800s

And foreigners too ! Japanese has only three names for colours in the whole spectrum, so Ito (one of the words) is kinda hard to translate

see Trevor Roper - through blunted sight
for more information.....

[Quizmonster]

You've never gazed out over the Mediterranean or Ionian Seas at sunset, then, eh, Peter? Apart from that, Homer was a poet and they have always had 'licence' to mould language to their needs.
Even in Sanskrit, the word for red' was 'rudhira'. It is perfectly plain, therefore, that - stretching more or less as far into the past as we can take language - the letters 'r' + 't/d' are associateed with the colour we call 'red'. Simple as that.

[jno]

well, he said the sea was as dark as wine, not as red/white/rose. Nonetheless, red is called something else in other languages... and even in English it can be crimson or scarlet... or Russian Velvet or Summer Surprise or Garnet Symphony (I got those from a Dulux colour chart). And even if we're looking at the same red wall, how do we know that what I see is the 'same' as what you see?

... so really, we get back to Quizmonster's answer: nobody decided the name of colours, or of anything else; the words just became understandable and acceptable among a wide range of people, who exported the language over the world...

[Peter Pedant]

Oh and the other thing is that Thomas Hardy, I think in far from the Madding Crowd mentions flowers nicknamed red backs on account of their resemblance to army Red Coats

I think it is the scene where tory cuts a lock of Bathsheva Everdene's hair on Eggardon - what ever the hill is called in the book

The only thinkg being that the flowers are almost certainly Early purple Orchids and they are purple and not red. he doesnt say how long you ahve to stare at them to see the resemblance.

and so you see, whether or not red as word existed in Sanskrit, what is red now may not have been red then.

[Quizmonster]

Nobody's disagreeing with that, Peter, but the question here is "Why is red called red?" It isn't, "Did the ancient people of the Indian sub-continent and, after them, the people of the Eastern Mediterranean see red in the same way as we do?" And it's called 'red' rather than 'gnuk' or 'thmid' for the reasons given.
As J pointed out above, we cannot even be sure whether he, you and I "see" the same colour when we use the word 'red' to describe it! So what hope have we of ever establishing what Hardy or anyone else meant?