At the end of the rainbow

Rød – Danish for red
Appelsínugulur – Icelandic for orange
Isfar – Maltese for yellow
Nogoon (ногоон) – Mongolian for green
Buluu – Swahili for blue
Orònya – Mohawk for blue (indigo)
Waiporoporo – Maori for purple (violet)

Thanks to all who’ve played along with this game. My sister asked me over a year ago whether I’d be capable of posting each colour of the rainbow consecutively without a break. I wanted to make it a puzzle and since the colours are very soon predictable, I decided to complicate it by spelling ‘rainbow’ with colour words in different languages. (The fact that my sister’s nearest town is called Γλώσσα (Glossa), the Greek for ‘language’, was a bonus.) Finally I got round to doing the research and thought I was doing fine until, on Saturday, I tripped over the staircase from heaven.

Along the way I’ve found some great information about language. While seeking (in vain) an appropriate word for ‘indigo’ in one of the Nigerian languages I came across this fascinating discussion. It may seem odd at first but ‘colour of leaves’ and ‘colour of sky’ are not far removed from how many European languages got their word for the colour ‘orange’.

There's lots of argument too about whether our words affect what we see. A couple of years ago the BBC broadcast an intriguing documentary about colour perception among the Himba people in Namibia. Sadly they have now blocked it but this page gives a small taste of some of the questions they were exploring.

So, tomorrow had better be mono...