Alan Turing and what's your colour?

Did you ever stop to think about the meaning of what you say, and where it comes from? Here are photos of some beautiful people. Not just my idea of beauty, but for one reason or another these were reported on the Internet as beautiful, so they must be, mustn't they?

Now all I see is four beautiful people, and I can't judge anything else about them. But here's the problem - some people label people by random characteristics and imply judgement by this. The commonest I've heard is black or white.

But what does this actually mean? One thing in the news recently is the TV screening of the The Imitation Game,a 2014 American historical drama thriller. The film is based on the British efforts to decipher German secret codes in the second world war. Although it is not a film to permit facts to stand in the way of a good story, it does show how symbols can in some way convey meaning.

But what's this to do with colour? Well the way we express meaning is to use words. The words I used to illustrate this are white and black. Now you can look these up in a good dictionary, or on Wikipedia, and find out how they come to mean what we read into them.

White is an English word - it came from Old English (Anglo-Saxon) hwit meaning bright, radiant, or clear. This itself came from pre-German hwitaz (which also became German weiß, from where we get the drink weißbier - white or wheat beer). This is understood to have come from Proto-Indo-European kweid-, kweit- "white, or to shine" (which also gave us Slavonic sviteti and Lithuanian šviesti "to shine,").

Black on the other hand is an English word which stems from Old English blæc "dark," from pre-German blakaz "burned". This is understood to have come from a Proto-Indo-European root bhleg- ("to burn, gleam, shine, flash")which came through ancient Greek as phlegein, "to burn". From this root it also gave other words to do with colourless - or fire, from Latin flagrare.

So what is in the name for a colour? Both black and white come from words meaning "no colour" but to do with shining or being lustrous. If we follow that meaning, where did the words go in other languages?

Black also gave European language words: old Germanic blankaz, via Latin blancus, gave the Catalan, Occitan and French blanc, Spanish blanco, Italian bianco, Galician-Portuguese branco. In fact, scholars tell us that Anglo-Saxon (Old German/English) used the term blac "devoid of colour" to mean either black or white!

Well, if most of modern Western Europe calls white "black", what do they call black? Not hard to guess, but they use other words. Proto-Indo-European words nek- or nok- "dark" or "night" give us Latin nigrum, Portuguese and Spanish negro, French noir (and English night). If you recognise a term there as derogatory for black (person) you are right, but in those languages it just means the colour, black.

It is not the only time a word has been misused by people - the same way, for the same people! An ancient name some trace back to Egypt is Ta-Muuri (spelling varies) which means land of the Moors (English spelling). It can be seen in other country names - Mauritius, Mauritania, Morocco - Moor (or older blackamoor) used to be as derogatory as negro. It means (colourless) person from the African continent that travelled out in pre-history to populate the rest of the world!

I prefer the term "beautiful people" ... as for Alan Turing, he was white, English and highly intelligent. He died young (41) at his own hand, because he was perceived as different