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Fun fact!

Did you know? The basque language originally lacks names for a lot of colours, and thought there are some theories no one knows why for sure!

We have names for:

-Red (Gorria)

-Yellow (Horia)

-Black (Beltza)

-White (Txuria)

-Blue (Urdina)

All other names and colours come from Spanish and French; Even though most colours have more than one meaning.

For example: She has grey hair/ Ile urdina du. (She has blue hair)

For example: The brown cow/ behi gorria. (The red cow)

Hope you liked it.

We don’t know for sure why Euskara lacks many colour names, but it may have a very simple explanation.

One of the theories was that ancient Basques simply didn’t need more colours. Wood was wood – brown – and everybody knew its colour, so having a word for that wasn’t a priority. Grass was grass – green – and, in nature, just leaves and grass are green. If someone had green eyes, for example, they had “eyes like grass” and that was it.

Besides – and this not only happens in Basque culture, but in many other ancient cultures too – each colour used to have a much wider spectrum that nowadays: blue went from green to grey, red went from orange to dark brown, etc.

It wasn’t until the Renaissance when the colour palette exploded and it was necessary to give a name to all those colours, and at the time, Euskara had been around for centuries. It’s logical that many colours are loanwords.