I would like to start my answer by saying that languages are very important for every human being and for the whole of mankind. We all speak languages, some people can speak only their native language, others study also foreign languages because they want to communicate with people from other nations and countries. In this world, we can observe many different things and in various languages, they are reflected in different ways. Colour is one of the things that are very important for people to understand the reality that is why it is necessary to know how is colour represented in this or that language for a better understanding of the language itself.
Especially important it is for little children who only begin their lives, and for people studying foreign languages because a new language means a new understanding of the world. Let us take the example of a little child who learns how the thing that he or she sees every day is called. Parents not only try to name the things but also compare them with something or describe them. When parents tell their child that that thing hanging on trees are called leaves they say also that these leaves are of green colour. That is how a child knows what are leaves and how the green colour looks like. This can be applied to other things that we see every day.
If we speak about a person who is studying a foreign language it is as important for him or her as for a little kid to understand colours and how they are named in the language that he or she studies. For example, to learn English well, a person must understand culture and colours are very important in this understanding. So, as we can see how colours are named in a language is rather important to understand this or that culture, and culture in its turn helps to study every language better.
And now I would like to draw your attention to the problem that I think is very important. Some people believe that all people who speak one language have the same associations with certain colours. People of other nations have another association with the same colours. But I think that here we should look not only at the language that a person speaks but at the psychology of this or that person. People that are sentimental can imagine the same things when they see, for example, the red colour, even if one of them speaks French and another one speaks English. At the same time, people who speak one and the same language can associate the red colour differently if their characters, upbringing and interests are different. This thing is very interesting and important for people to communicate with each other.
Also, we can suppose that the way how people understand colours is predetermined by some colours that are known to all people and they all provoke the same images when people see them. These colours are yellow, green red and some others and all people know them because they can be seen in the world very often. But the thought that people perceive these very colours, in the same way, is true not in all aspects. For example, when I see the red colour I imagine a beautiful rose flower. At the same time, another person who is crueller or represents a specific profession may imagine blood or any other thing while seeing the same colour. This is happening because we are different people, we have different upbringings and we came from different families. Plus our psychology is different, we think in different ways, although we speak one and the same language.
But there is such a fact that in some languages colors are named similarly, and in other languages we can see no similarities. I can say that this happens because languages are of different origin, I mean that nations that live next to each other speak languages that are similar in some things. In countries that are situated far away from each other languages are almost completely different because they are not connected and their cultures have few common features. But these are not the examples of universal colors because they are common only for some connected countries and not for all languages of the world.
Some people perceive colors subjectively. I mean that they see colors in their own way, which differs in something from what other people imagine when they see this or that color. Other people do it according to the nature of a certain region. Different people associate colors with different things of the objective reality and perceive them differently due to this reason. But this is based not on the universal colors. The reasons to it are psychology and thinking of a certain person. How we speak is how we perceive colors, and how we perceive colors is how we perceive the objective reality.
Works Cited
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