Color symbolism
Languages and cultures divide up the visual spectrum into color lexemes in various ways, even in cognate languages red and rauð may not refer to the exact same shades of color. A famous example of this is the root word for blue, which originally referred to shades we now call black. But although it is easy enough to anthropologically investigate this, say with a color chart, it becomes a bit more tricky to track down all the cultural associations with different colors. Just now I noticed again the Icelandic use of blá (ie: blue) as a prefix for things that are dangerous, slightly scary, even potentially life-threatening. So the name bláfell (blue mountain) should not sound lovely to me, it should sound ominous. I suppose I never will learn.
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