Are you quite sure you know what colour blue is? I was quite sure myself—until I heard that in Serbian it is called plav. And then I was off, down the etymological rabbit hole.
The Word You Cannot Use
To begin with, plav is not blue in general but a pale blue, the light end of the range. If you want a proper dark blue you must ask for modar—a word the Slavic languages all share and English has no relative for at all.
And secondly, plav covers everything pale: blondes and blue-eyed people alike. Indeed plava on its own, applied to a woman, simply means a blonde.
Which puts anyone translating a blue-haired character into Serbian in a curious position. Take Collodi’s Fairy with Turquoise Hair. The obvious rendering of blue hair would be plava kosa—except that plava kosa is what every Serbian reader understands as fair hair. The natural word is the one word you cannot use. The translator must swerve deliberately into modra or azurna to stop the fairy going blonde on him.
English has the same collision and never notices it, because we solved the problem by borrowing: our blonde came from French, leaving blue free to mean blue. Serbian declined to borrow, and has been living with the consequences ever since.
The Slavic Kaleidoscope
- In Bulgarian, plav is very nearly sky-coloured.
- In Macedonian and Slovene, simply blue.
- In Czech and Slovak, plavý is a blond.
- In Polish, płowy is the colour of straw—or of a deer.
That last one should ring a bell, because English keeps the very same word: fallow, as in the fallow deer, whose coat is precisely that tawny, faded gold. Polish and English preserved the shade; Serbian took it all the way to the sky.
Fire, Ash, and Distant Relations
And every one of these shades is related. They go back to an ancient Proto-Indo-European root *pelH- meaning ‘ashen, pale’—and, at the same time, ‘to burn.’
Yes: ash and flame in a single root. Which is why English pale, German fahl, and French fauve (the wild tawny beast that gave its name to the Fauves) are all cousins.
The family gets stranger the further out you go:
- Lloyd is Welsh for ‘grey’—so a certain celebrated band is, etymologically, Pink Grey. Floyd is the same word with an English accent.
- Polio is Greek polios ‘grey,’ after the grey matter it attacks.
- Peloponnese is the island of Pelops, whose name contains the same dusky root.
So the next time somebody tells you the sky is blue, you may reply, with perfect etymological propriety, that it is the colour of ashes.
