Celandine (Ranunculus ficaria, now renamed Ficaria verna) in the woodland part of my garden this week
What a strange word “yellow” seems to be. While most of our words for basic colours are very similar to the German words, such as blue, green and red for blau, grün and rot, at first glance yellow and gelb don’t seem to be related. But they are – about which I’ll say more later.
For now I will enthuse about this glorious colour of spring. Its hues are all around…
Daffodil (Narcissus) – national flower of Wales and in bloom in time for St David’s Day on March 1
Primrose (Primula vulgaris) gives its name to a certain shade of yellow
People are often asked “what is your favourite colour?” but there is no simple answer. Favourite colour to look at? To wear? To paint on your walls? For your car? I certainly love to look at yellow, and one of our rooms has primrose yellow walls, but I absolutely cannot wear yellow as it makes my skin look sallow. I cringe when I remember wearing a skimpy yellow mini-dress to a disco when I was a teenager.
But it does seem to be a fashionable shade at the moment, judging by a couple of popular movies…
Emma Stone wears yellow in the publicity shots for La La Land
Emma Watson wears a yellow gown in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast – as the cartoon character did back in the 1991 version, so maybe it’s not a totally new trend
I have been noticing yellow clothes on TV, too. Here’s Sophie Rayworth, a BBC newsreader, who wore bright chrome yellow when she pursued her ancestry in the Who Do You Think You Are? series.
The BBC’s blonde Sophie Rayworth can carry off the colour yellow, with or without her tan
Here is an interesting story from a few years ago, featuring a cape made from spider silk – and that gold is the natural colour…
This cape was made from the silk of a million Golden Orb Weaver spiders, found in the mountains of Madagascar – click on the image to see the Daily Mail story
Personally I don’t think yellow works with pale complexions, but in combination with dark skin and bright sunshine, these vivid yellows are glorious – images of models Akuol de Mabior and Simone Awor from the Stream Africa website – click on the picture to see some more stunning shots
My view of “yellow” is quite limited and I don’t count mustard shades. My favourites are primrose, buttercup and chrome yellow, which I remember as a painting pigment, a cool, bright yellow. It’s also called lemon yellow, king’s yellow, Leipzig yellow, Paris yellow, Vienna yellow or Cologne yellow (see more here).
I consider Mahonia (barberry) flowers to be chrome yellow, although this image has a hint of greenness…
Mahonia flowers in the garden – they are coming to the end of their season in the sun
Although my view of yellow is limited, Ingrid Sundberg once compiled a Color Thesaurus. These are her yellows…
The yellow part of Ingrid Sundberg’s Color Thesaurus
But back to the etymology of yellow. If we go way back to Neolithic times, roughly around 3,500 years BCE, our ancestors in the area north of the Caspian Sea and Black Sea are believed to have spoken a language that has been reconstructed as Proto-Indian-European (PIE). And most of our modern European languages descended from this in various roundabout ways.
The relevant PIE root word here seems to be ghel, meaning “to shine” and other related modern words are gold, gild, glitter, gleam and glow – even glass and glad.
Its route to the English word yellow seems to be ghelHwos (PIE) – gelwaz (Proto-Germanic) – geolu, geolwe (Old English). But that g at the beginning still needed some work. A sound change happened between Old English and Modern English, through something called palatalisation. Try it for yourself! If you say “ga” then “ya” you can feel your tongue moving up to touch the roof of your mouth (the palate) for the “ya”.
This change has happened a lot – compare these German/English words: Tag/day, Garn/yarn, Weg/way, Nagel/nail and these Old English/Modern English words: gear/year geldan/yield, graeg/grey.
The English word is related to other Germanic words for yellow: yella (Scots), jeel (East Frisian), giel (West Frisian), geel (Dutch), gul (Swedish and Norwegian).
The PIE root word ghlo, a variant of ghel took the “bright” meaning to the colour green as well as yellow, perhaps because of the bright shoots of spring. Hence the the Greek word khloros , meaning “greenish-yellow” and the name Khloe, literally “young green shoot”. This was one of the names of the fertility goddess Demeter. Today we still have Chloe as a girl’s name.
That’s a very big bottle of perfume – or a very small woman – Chloe is the name of a French luxury fashion house
The French word for yellow came a different route – jaune comes from Old French jalne from Latin galbinus and back to ghelHwos (PIE). The Italian giallo is no doubt related.
In Welsh, which is an older language than English, the word for yellow, melyn, comes from Proto-Celtic meli, which, like the Latin mel, came from Proto-Indo-European mélid, all these words meaning honey. In English a related word is mellifluous, “flowing with honey”.
The word in Welsh most closely related to the ancestral PIE word ghel, meaning “bright or shining”, is glas, which means “green-blue-grey”, not yellow.
The associations of the colour yellow are not all positive. It is also associated with illness. People suffer from jaundice (see the French jaune mentioned above) and cholera is a terrible disease with yellowish diarrhoea. The word cholera comes straight from the Latin, and from the Greek kholera, again related to that yellow-green word khloros. Although khole also meant gall, bile, or a gutter.
The four bodily humours – blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm – were once believed to control people’s mental and physical health. Too much yellow bile could make you irascible, choleric, and sick. Perhaps this also led to an association of yellow with cowardice, although a racist aspect can’t be ruled out in this.
In nature if you put together yellow with black, you are warning of danger, or saying “don’t eat me because I don’t taste very nice”. This may be why I didn’t like Morrisons supermarkets until they changed their logo a few years ago, from black and yellow to a more appealing green and yellow. Does anyone love wasps?
The old Morrisons logo and the face of a common wasp (Vespula vulgaris) by Tim Evison – click on the image to go to the source on Wikipedia
Being so bright, yellow is useful for keeping us safe as well as warning of danger. A luminous yellow is ideal for high visibility jackets so drivers can see you and avoid a collision, and in the UK an amber yellow is used on some road signs – mainly for directions and warnings about roadworks.
But I’ll finish where I began, on a happy note, with golden flowers. Although they are not in season, I try to have yellow chrysanthemums in the house all year round…
Yellow chrysanthemums are so cheerful…
The Squirrelbasket 
Re. the Morrisons sign. I read once that shoppers are attracted to things in yellow packaging. I find I’m the opposite – I see yellow and think ‘cheap’ and am put off. (Not ‘inexpensive’ which is different.)
Yellow on me would look appalling.
But hardly anything is better than first daffodils, cut, brought indoors and plonked in a bottl on the kitchen table.
Agree with all that, I think.
And I am so pleased you are getting back into the Loose and Leafy blog…
Best wishes 🙂
As with all colours it depends, I guess, what you pair it with. Blue and yellow are a winning combination.
I agree there – and would add blue, yellow and white together – bluebells and celandine, or as my husband would say, a Leeds United scarf…
Best wishes 🙂
Another nice thing about yellow is that the 5% of the population that’s red-green color blind (10% of all men) can see yellow just fine, not so for so-called ‘safety’ or ‘high-visibility’ orange or red! which I’m told just don’t stand out at all for the red-green colorblind.
That’s interesting. I wonder if that was taken into account when choosing yellow for high-vis?
All the best 🙂
Not sure if anyone love wasps, but there is a lot of bee love put there, and bees are often yellow and black (especially in illustrations for kids) Don’t mind me – I have pedantic tendencies! ;-D Colour is so subjective, I find. What I call purple, other people call blue, and what I call strong pink, others call purple. Come to think of it, I don’t think there’s been any confusion about yellow!
I always think of bees as “honey” coloured – but in terms of yellow and black, I do like hoverflies, which are just pretending to be nasty.
And yes it is all subjective. I am not colour blind but I do disagree on what to call certain shades between purple and blue and green.
All the best 🙂
The etymology is fascinating. Thanks for sharing it.
As for fear-inducing yellow and black faces, the yellowjacket (vespula squamosa) is one our fiercest bees.
I think it’s great that you call them “yellowjackets” in the USA, I don’t think we do in Britain.
I just looked up your Vespula squamosa and I see it’s described as a social wasp – sounds a bit antisocial to me!
Best wishes 🙂