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  • Regarding the two terms for black, note that they are only partially interchangeable:

    • āter (dull black) - more like an object covered in soot
    • niger (shining black) - more like a black dog or cat, with a really lustrous fur

    Same deal with albus (dull white) and candidus (shining white). In fact candidus is related to candeō "I shine".

    Don't be surprised if you see 9001 names for the same colour. A lot of those are actually hues, named after some object with that colour + -eus (the noun→adjective suffix). For example, grey can be also "cinereus" (ash-coloured) or plumbeus (lead-coloured). (It could be also "glaucus", if it's a bluish~greenish one. Obvious Greek borrowing.)

    I'm not sure if I'd call lūteus "orange" or "yellow". The name is a reference to this plant, used for dyeing:
    \

    Either way, the long vowel here is damn important. Lūteus [u:] is that colour; while luteus [ʊ] is "muddy, filthy". It's that sort of word that you could use in Rome to pick a fight against someone.

    If referring to hair colour, rutilus works nicely for red hair.

    Note that as typical for Latin adjectives, all of those change depending on grammatical gender and case. But it's easy:

    • if the noun is feminine, sub that -us with -a then treat the adjective as a 1st declension noun; e.g. "res est caerulea" (the thing is blue)
    • if the noun is masculine or neuter, just treat it as a 2nd declension noun; e.g. "Claudius capillōs rutilōs habet" (Claudius has orange hairs).

    The ones ending in -er typically lose the -e- when you get another vowel after it; e.g. ruber → rubra, rubrum, rubrōs etc.

    • You never fail to make such good comments :D I probably should have specified the differences between those two. I did double-check the color names just in case, but i could've missed that. If otherwise, i would've probably edited the mistake.

      Long vowels in latin are pretty interesting. Usually i think of more precise pronunciation as a property for asian/semitic languages (harakaat, chinese tones, niqqud etc) but while most of the time in latin you don't have to pay too much attention to it, but in some edge cases it can completely change the meaning. That's what i'm afraid of (with who? Have no idea, not like there's any native latin speakers to heckle me lol)

      Thank you!

      • BRB, bringing Cicero back with a time machine - he must judge our pronunciations! X-D

        I wouldn't be too worried about it. There are minimal pairs, but most of the time you can get who's who by context; even nominative -a vs. ablative -ā, one is often right at the start of the sentence, the other is typically right before the verb. Ecclesiastical speakers typically don't even bother.

        And apparently some native speakers didn't either; specially in Sardinia and Africa proconsularis, the local dialects merged long/short pairs early on. (Eventually other dialects would do the same, but they first rearranged the vowels. It seems that Latin in those parts did something German and plenty Arabic varieties do, short vowels get centralised.)

        the ones that I remember, besides luteus/lūteus and NOM/ABL:

        • anus "old woman" / ānus "ring, anus"
        • os "bone" / ōs "mouth"
        • malum "evil" (N) / mālum "apple"

  • My rudimentary Latin is just enough to notice that 'blue' and 'sky' share a root.

    Neat.

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