brown
The color brown denotes a strongly darkened orange or red . Well-known brown colorants are Van Dyck brown , sepia , red chalk , umber and ocher .
| Color sample |
|---|
|
Black brown
color code: # 553A26
Tan
color code: # 645D25
Orange brown
color code: # 965220 |
|
Red brown
color code: # 963F20
Ocher brown
color code: # 957101 |
Color theory
Colorimetrically , a color is called brown if it is the result of mixing red with green (red chalk) or red with green and black (umber). Brown is a broken color . The tones referred to as brown take up a comparatively large area in color spaces. For example, there is a rough division into yellow, gold, red and black-brown. Brown belongs to the tertiary colors and on the other hand to the natural colors .
The color group of brown tones includes color tones between neutral yellow and wine red with a brightness below 50%. The saturation for the red browns is around 30% and around 70% for yellows. Yellow tones change more quickly into a color nuance that is perceived as independent , while broken red tones with the same proportion of black are still perceived as dark red . Brown in all its diversity can be mixed with a wide range of colorants. A tertiary color, in which the proportion of warm colorants predominates, leads to the brown tones.
Linguistic
Germanic languages
The German word "brown" probably goes back to a synonymous Indo-European color word * bher , which resulted in the color designation in all North and West Germanic languages ( Old High German . And Old English . Brūn , New English brown , Dutch bruin , Swedish brun etc.). In Gothic , the corresponding adjective ( * brunjō ) is not attested, but this is probably due to the sparse tradition, namely the fact that the color brown does not appear in the entire New Testament and thus not in the Wulfilabibel , by far the most extensive written testimony this East Germanic language. The names of some brown animals in German go back to the idg. Root * bher , including bear and beaver ; a probable non-Germanic cognate is Greek Φρύνη " toad ".
Until the 18th century, “brown” was sometimes also referred to as a dark shade of purple . The adjective can be found in this meaning several times in Luther , and the "brown nights", which are mentioned more often in German baroque poetry (for example in the hymn "Down is the sunshine / the brown night breaks in strongly" ) do not describe any Brown, but the blue to purple-black color of the deepest twilight. This linguistic usage, which is now obsolete, is probably not explained by a change in meaning , rather it is a completely different word that goes back to Latin prunus , “ plum ”, i.e. a homonym that is not etymologically related .
Romance languages
In the Romance languages , the names for shades of brown are much more varied. Latin probably had no basic color lexeme corresponding to Germanic ; fuscus , which is probably the most common word for this, was also used for gray and blackish colors, so just like its reflexes in today's Romance languages (it. fosco , span. hosco ) it generally means something like "dark, sinister". This lexical gap was only closed in Middle Latin by the creation of the word brunneus , which, like Italian bruno , French brun and Romanian brun, is a borrowing from Germanic. It is conceivable that this new loan word was introduced by Germanic mercenaries as early as the Vulgar Latin of late antiquity and distributed throughout Romania - it was first booked in the 6th century as brunus with Isidore of Seville - but there is no Spanish or Portuguese for it Correspondence.
Adjectives that refer to the color of chestnuts (or chestnuts or "chestnuts") are available in two versions in every Romance language: French châtain and marron , Italian castano and marrone , Spanish castaño and marrón , Portuguese castanho and marrom , romanian castaniu and maro . The use of the respective cognates also diverges considerably in the individual languages.
In French and Italian, châtain and castano have a rather narrow range of meanings and are primarily, if not exclusively, used as a description of the brown hair color (or the coat color, especially of horses ) and possibly also the eye color . In contrast, the French brun and marron are more general collective names for all kinds of brown tones, with brun being the traditional generic term, marron, on the other hand, a relatively recent borrowing from Italian, which was only in common use in the 18th century, but was naturalized very quickly, at least not as a foreign word is perceived. In today's linguistic usage, the two words are now used with similar frequency and are largely synonymous, i.e. in most cases interchangeable - with one significant exception: as a description of a brownish hair or skin color, marron rarely or never occurs. In Italian, bruno and marrone are also largely synonymous and in common use, although in the most recent colloquial language the weight here has shifted noticeably in favor of marrone ; In the traditional technical language of painting, however, bruno is still the correct expression.
In Spanish, too, marron is gaining ground as a generic term, but not in the entire Spanish-speaking area and not to everyone's favor. The word did not get into Spanish until the early 20th century and not from Italian, but via French. Today it is almost completely naturalized, at least in Spain, but the Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española expressly marks it as Gallicism in its most recent edition . Regardless of this, it supersedes castaño , which until now has been the usual color lexeme for all shades of brown in Spanish and is different from French châtain and it. castano is not only used in relation to hair, coat and eye colors.
Slavic languages
In Russian, on the other hand, the most common name for browns is коричневый, for " cinnamon ."
symbolism
politics
- In heraldry, brown is not one of the actual heraldic colors; it was only later assigned to the heraldic tinctures .
- As a political symbol color , brown historically stands for National Socialism . The brown color was uniformly used for the shirts of the SA uniform ("brown shirts") from 1925 at the latest . Brown was used as a symbol for the connection with the ground. The uniform color became the identification color. The " Brown House " was the party headquarters of the NSDAP from 1930 to 1945 in Munich . Based on this, the color is used in the political spectrum for neo-Nazism and, more recently, for the extreme right . For example, in the (red) Berlin-Friedrichshain, the Green Way was given the name Brauner Weg on October 25, 1933 . From spring 1945 this led to the (unofficial) name Red Way . The color was increasingly set for nationalism: an anti-fascist committee published the Brown Book on the Reichstag fire and Hitler terror shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933 .
additional
- "Sun brown" as tanning of the skin is nowadays viewed positively in Western cultures. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, tanned skin was still considered unsightly, especially for women, because the skin dries out and ages prematurely from constant sunlight. Therefore, the ideal of beauty for millennia was white skin, today sometimes disparagingly referred to as "elegant paleness". Today, a tan is almost a kind of status symbol with which you can demonstrate that you have enough leisure and money to go on vacation and / or to lie in the sun.
- In fashion , brown colors designate earth tones according to the theory of color types .
- In many martial arts such as Jiu Jitsu , Judo and Karate , a belt ( Japanese obi ) is worn as part of martial arts clothing ( Japanese keikogi ). The brown belt represents the state of knowledge of the Budoka and the upper and highest student grades ( Japanese Kyū -grade) reserved.
- In electrical engineering , the color brown is used as a color code for the insulation of wires (see identification of multi-core cables and number of conductors ) and for resistors (numerical value 1)
- Gas bottles are marked with the RAL colors brown and maroon, for example for acetylene and helium.
- In the railway brown coats were often used, since their appearance at pollution especially brake dust changes little. At the time of the Länderbahn , third- class passenger coaches for several railways were painted brown. For freight wagons have been and paints are used in various shades of brown. In Switzerland , electric locomotives and diesel locomotives were sometimes painted brown, but this is still the case today with older BLS AG locomotives . From the mid-1930s to the early 1960s, most of the Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane vehicles were painted in the colors Castano ( chestnut brown ) and Isabella ( Isabel colors , a light brown); in the 1960s this was simplified to a solid maroon paint job, which was replaced by gray and other shades around 1970. The Norges Statsbaner also used a brown paint until the 1980s, the NSB Di 4 diesel locomotives are still painted that way today.
Web links
- Bruce MacEvoy: Color vision. Color temperature. Unsaturated color zones. at www.handprint.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ Color sample from handprint (September 14, 2006).
- ↑ Graphic “unsaturated color zones in a generic color wheel”. In: Handprint (September 26, 2006).
- ↑ Brown. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 2 : Beer murderer – D - (II). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1860, Sp. 323-325 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
- ↑ Johannes Sofer: Latin and Romance from the Etymologiae of Isidorus of Seville: Investigations into Latin and Romance verbal studies . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1930; here, however, the usual attribution of the gloss in question to Isidore is called into question.
- ↑ Isabel Forbes: The Terms brun and marron in Modern Standard French . In: Journal of Linguistics 15: 2, 1979, pp. 295-305.
- ↑ Paolo D'Achille and Maria Grossmann: I termini di colore nell'area 'bruno-marrone' in italiano: sincronia e diacronia . In: Lingua e Stile 52, 2017, pp. 87–118.
- ^ Rosalía García: Marrón: formas y matices . In: Revista de Lexicografía 17, 2011, pp. 7-13.
- ↑ brown. In: Digital dictionary of the German language .
- ^ Anatoly Liberman : A Study in Brown and in a Brown Study. Two- part essay in his etymology blog The Oxford Etymologist : Part 1 (September 24, 2014), Part 2 (October 15, 2014)
- ↑ Brown was the color of the Nazis during the Nazi era. In: The time . November 17, 2011.
- ^ GRA Foundation against Racism and Anti-Semitism : “The service uniforms of the party cadres of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) and their paramilitary storm department (SA) were light brown. As early as the Weimar Republic, the National Socialists were known as “the browns” or “brown shirts” - and not just by their opponents. Brown was also the color of the party in the NSDAP's self-image. "
- ↑ The German brown corresponded to the symbolism "black" of the Italian fascists. It was also chosen in contrast to the red of the labor movement.
- ↑ GRA Foundation against Racism and Anti-Semitism : “After the Second World War, braun remained linked in the political discussion with National Socialism and related attitudes. [...] The Swiss Federal Court dealt with it in 1995 in a defamation process (BGE 121 IV 76 ff.) "
