lesson 16 - colours

jelo comes from the english word "yellow" and has a very similar meaning. It refers to yellows, oranges, and sometimes yellowish greens. I would use jelo to talk about any shade of cadmium yellow.

laso talks about both blues and greens at the same time. it can describe a large range of colors that are often seperated in other languages, such as English. In English, blue and green are separate concepts with their own semantic space. In toki pona (as well as countless languages across the world), these concepts are merged into one. Many linguists affectionally call this color "grue" in the contexts of analyzing other languages, and the term can be helpful here because it gives a fantastic anchor for color perspective to English speakers. Think to yourself how often it is crucial to distinguish between blue and green. In cases where you wish to do so, greens are yellowier than blues, so it's easy to modify laso with a word like "jelo" to specify that, but if you don't need to specify, doing so adds more clutter to your speaking. I wouldn't go much darker than cobalt blue before using pimeja instead. because cool colors like laso tend to be darker a lot of the time, don't forget about pimeja!

Another part of laso worth mentioning is purples. While somewhat controversial, when I showed several toki ponists color chips (the kind you use when choosing which color to paint your wall), most of the darker or bluer shades of purple that were not dark enough to be pimeja were unanimously laso. Some of the lighter or pinker ones were called loje. There was also some overlap, and some people stated the importance of the surrounding colors. These are all things to keep in mind when you encounter a color that seems hard to talk about in toki pona. I'm often reminded of paints, and a purple like dioxazine violet would most definitely be pimeja and not laso.

loje speaks to reddish colors and pigments. cadmium reds all the way down to a darkish alizarin crimson. You can start mixing violet into loje for a while before it starts getting more laso or pimeja. You can also brighten it into orange and it can still be loje, but there's a gray area between loje and jelo that I encourage learners to play around with!

The semantic space of pimeja contains types of darkness. This could talk about specific colors like deep red or dark emerald green, but it can also talk about shadows, places where there is less light, or the absence of brighter colors. pimeja can describe anything that is dark. From some perspectives, the night is a type of darkness more than a period of time (just as a day can be a type of brightness and a year can be a type of circle).

walo is any bright color like white, pink, light blue, etc.