So I guess qing (青) really is blue…

Date: 2007.05.11 | Category: General | Tags:

I went to a very interesting talk yesterday by Su-Ling Yeh of National Taiwan University on Chinese character processing. One of her studies seems to have addressed something I’ve always been confused about. In Wenlin, the character 青 is defined “green (blue, black)” and this is a problematic concept for me. In 青天 (blue sky) it’s clearly blue (although having lived in Beijing, green is also a possibility, I suppose), but in 青菜 (green vegetables) it should be green.

Su-Ling Yeh has a neat result showing that you can find effects of color name radicals in characters on Stroop tasks. So if you have the character 猜 (cai, guess) written in red, you have  interference  for naming the color of  ink, and facilitation if it’s written in blue.

I’m going to meet her later and I still have some questions about this study. Because I’m not sure why you would use qing (青) for blue instead of lan (蓝), and I wonder what would happen if you had to say that the character 猜  was written in 蓝 colored ink.

She did find effects for 恤 (xu, pity) , which contains 血 (xue, blood), which is not a color name but has a strong association with red.

(I’ve also wondered about the morphology of 猜 , cai, guess. Karlgren claims that a green dog would be a curious color, which is useful in remembering it in a “just so story” sort of way).