Teaching colors with Cambridge in mind

I’m often asked in my exploratory sixth grade Latin course when we’re going to “learn the colors and the numbers,” vocabulary near and dear to the heart of modern language curricula. Hmmm…

Numbers? Sure. But colors? How do I tell my students that I don’t want to teach colors until they’re ready for noun-adjective agreement?

What’s more, because I respect Cambridge’s approach to Latin, the idea of simply “teaching” a set of vocabulary by itself without integrating it into an engaging story or meaningful cultural context doesn’t appeal to me.

To top it off, the ancients did not “see” colors nearly the same as we do. Homer called the sea “wine-dark,” but it’s unlikely he saw it as Cabernet Sauvignon purple.

So there are several issues here.

Never fear. Sir Isaac Newton, visionary 17th century scientist, is here to help and he’s brought his prism.

Newton and colors

Newton’s scientific writings about optics, light, and color were originally written in Latin, for centuries the pan-European language of science.

His Lectiones opticae set out the experiments that paved the way for our modern view of color, most famously in his work with dispersive prisms:

Et sic radii prout apti sunt ut alii aliis magis atque magis refringantur, hos ordine colores, rubrum, flavum, viridem, caeruleum, et purpureum generant, una cum omnibus intermediis quos in Iride liceat conspicere.

“Hence, in so far as the rays [of light] are so disposed, that some are refracted more and more than others, they generate in order these colors, red, yellow, green, blue, and purple, together with all those intermediate ones that can be seen in the rainbow.” (translation A.R. Shapiro, The Optical Papers of Sir Isaac Newton (Vol. I, The Optical Lectures, 1670-1672). Cambridge University Press, 1984. Annotated Latin edition with facing English translation.)

Here is a passage about colors in authentic Latin—it’s just a modern view of colors. So you can “teach the colors” faithfully and read Latin at the same time.

By the way, Newton’s clear and idiomatic Latin ranges from Unit 2 to Unit 4 complexity. Here is a suggested passage you can use, adapted for Unit 2.

What about orange and indigo?

If you are familiar with that old mnemonic device about the colors of the spectrum, ROY G. BIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet), you may have noticed that orange and indigo are missing from Newton’s Latin color spectrum quoted above.

Newton only added these colors in later, when he decided to harmonize the number of colors in the spectrum with the seven notes of the musical scale (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti).

These colors were citrius (orange) and Indicus (indigo). Both these colors are not classical in usage but were coined later, as Indicus (“from India”) indicates. Oranges didn’t come to the Mediterranean area until at least 1450 CE.

Newton’s practice of expanding from five basic colors to seven helps us segue to the study of ancient Roman colors. Essentially, what we consider to be “standard” colors are only those on which we have come to a general consensus.

Newton’s Latin color terms were adopted by most scientists around 1704, but before then there was variation both in number and vocabulary according to the scientist.

This highlights the fact that colors for the pre-scientific Romans were never standardized and always consisted of shades rather than the “true” colors we know both from physics and from art.

As many know, for example, “purpureus” is not true royal purple but a shade of purple that ranges from magenta to crimson, light to dark. Tyrian purple dye made from the murex snail is, according to the ancient scientist Pliny the Elder, “the color of clotted blood, inclining to black.”

Here is a table of color terms in Latin that resist the definitions of fire-engine red and caution-tape yellow that we are conditioned to see.

This is just a start, of course. Colors in Latin are rich in pedagogical possibilities. Let them brighten your classroom!

David Frauenfelder teaches Latin at St. John’s Middle School in Houston, Texas, where he is also the Class 6 Lead Advisor. He is the author of the Master Mage of Rome series of young YA novels, in which grammar is magic—and vice versa.

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