By pure coincidence my lads had his home tutor today for his media studies/language A level and one of the areas covered was colours and language. Although we commonly think in the West of the basic range of colours being the 7 colours of the rainbow, anthropological studies in the late 60s found that many cultures simply do not/did not have proper names for most colours. This did not make them less educated or developed by any means but they simply used different words. Some tribes that lived in jungles for example had no word for the colour "green" simply because they were surrounded by so many variations of it and their language expressed this-, a bit like the Greenlanders who have several words for the different type of snow. Most Europeans had no proper name for Orange even though it might appear in paintings or clothing and it was mostly referred to as a degree of red (hence robins are said to have red breasts when they are, in fact orange). It wasn't until oranges became more common from Spain that the name of the fruit also became the name of the colour.

Results showed that the commonality of all cultures studied was that there was a kind of priority in identifying and naming colours in their languages. First came black and white and then third was "red", probably because red is the warning colour throughout much of nature. Next came green and yellow but several cultures had no proper word for the colour blue despite the fact that all had the sky above them.