When people talk about the cultural construction of color, the example that always comes up is orange. “Orange” designates a color and a fruit; the historical evidence will tell you that the fruit came first, so the color must have been named after the fruit. This is true not only in English but in every language spoken west of China. Edible oranges came from India more or less directly to Europe (“orange” itself being an anglicization of the Hindi word via Spanish and French). They were carried back east by Portuguese merchants, with the result that they came to be called “bortugali” in Arabic. There too, the name of the fruit became the name of a color, so that to call something “orange” in Arabic is actually to call it Portuguese.
This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of culturally-conditioned color-awareness. When people had the fruit, they started paying attention to the color; before they had the fruit, orange things were described as “red” or “gold” or “yellow” or via some mixture of those terms.
Fair enough, but the unanswered question is why oranges, in particular, should have caused people to start seeing the world differently. After all, there’s no prima facie reason why oranges themselves couldn’t have been described as red or gold. Compare Andrew Marvell’s “Bermuda” (c 1653):
He hangs in shades the orange bright
like golden lamps in a green night.
We only assume that oranges are orange out of centuries of habit.
What got me thinking about this problem was a parallel case in a narrower set of languages, also involving an introduced agricultural product – in this case coffee. Arabic (bunni), Persian, and Turkish (both kahverengi) get their word for brown either from coffee itself or – more probably, since the Islamicate World took its coffee black – from the coffee bean.
I thought this was pretty weird. There aren’t all that many orange things in nature, so you can get by easily without a specialized word for that color. Brown things, by contrast, are everywhere. Dirt, trees, leather, pottery: you’d think there would have been a word since time immemorial to indicate the color that all these things had in common. Why did it take coffee to make people notice the color brown?
It always bears repeating that words are tools. If we’re trying to explain the invention of a new word (and, if you like, the corresponding concept), we should start by asking what the word was good for. Color words are good for description. As Marvell shows, though, you can describe the color of an orange without calling it “orange.”
But color words also give us norms that can be useful for setting rules or giving instructions (e.g. “cook the onions until they turn brown.”) I suspect that something like this is at work behind the adoption of “orange” and “coffee-colored” as color words in the early modern period. You need a certain kind of color-consciousness to cultivate both these crops. Oranges tell you when they’re ready to eat by turning a certain shade that isn’t exactly yellow, gold, or red. Coffee beans need to be roasted to a certain level of darkness, but you certainly don’t want to turn them black. In both cases, new color-words helped to spread an awareness of the color norms governing the harvest and preparation of a new crop. That, I suspect, is what these color-words were good for; they were descriptive second, normative first.