I was reading about that development of colour language jsut recently and it’s utterly entirely fascinating!
The fact some languages/cultures distinguish primarily by saturation not hue and all sort of cool interesting stuff!
yes, I’ve been resisting the urge to go and look at it again because I’ve got work to do, but it is truly fascinating.
Let’s not forget too that many colour words (in many languages) come directly from objects - wine, gold, plum, orange…
I personally think the Welsh way of running colour names together is lovely - teal as a colour derived from the bird of the same name and petrol as a colour derived from, well, petrol (!) whereas with gwyrddlas you know what you’re getting! 
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@siaronjames, as both gwyrddlas and glaswyrdd exist, is there a difference? I mean is each more towards the first colour than the second? Because I would tend to presume so, if wanting to describe a colour. 
Kind of yes and no, I think (infuriating, right?! :-D)
Technically, because of the way they are spelt (as one conjoined word with the second colour mutating after the first), this implies that the first part is describing the second, so gwyrddlas would be a greenish-blue and glaswyrdd would be a bluish green.
However, I don’t think it would be completely wrong to use either for both bluish-green or greenish-blue (if someone would like to confirm!) because after all people’s perception of exactly where that particular colour change occurs can differ.
Also, I would say that if you were to use either of these in poetry, I imagine it would depend rather more on what you wanted them to rhyme with than on the exact colour you were trying to describe!
I had to Google “Petrol blue”
Can I just say in an utter tangent… Huh? Petrol is not that colour!
Petrol is yellowish (UKside anyway - do they dye it some other colour elsewhere?) [Googles fuel dye] Yes but not blue.
100LL Avgas is blue…
I hearby rename Petrol Blue, Avgas Blue (Ish)
And semi-syth 50:1 twostroke mix shall now be know as “Rhubarb’s Ribena Red”… (My youngest nephew thinks my microlight runs on Ribena due to fuel colour…
Yes, I don’t get the petrol thing either, but apparently that’s the source. Another one for my ‘must check this out at some point’ list (unless the QI elves beat me to it. must check that forum again soon. see, the list keeps growing! aaarrghh!)
I took some time and care to choose the colour for the woodwork in my music room. Eventually I found a “Wedgwood Blue” which evoked exactly the right ambience.
My favourite colour is the colour that stcks vividly (literally) in my mind of a skirting board in my infant memory that was a deep glossy dark venous blood crimson. ** I offer “Coch gwaed gwythiennol” to add to our lexicon.
** What does this say about me? I don’t wanna know. 
Diolch @siaronjames that is really helpful!
to @leiafee when the Corsa was first launched by Vauxhall, I went to look at one in Abertawe. I liked a lot about it and asked about colours. I fancied dark blue. He showed me a colour chart. One blue was pale and metallic, the other? “That isn’t blue. it’s purple!” I declared. I think it was Peacock Blue he said they were calling it, but it was definitely purple! They eventually started dark blue when they got the BSM contract, as they insist on red cars, white cars and cars that are blue NOT purple!
Paraffin blue anyone (though sometimes it was pink).
Cheers J.P.
pink with us! During the war, i wouldn’t swear to it, but i think it was just natural. i don’t recall a pretty colour! But that was paraffin, not petrol. For that, the only colour associated was red x added. Now, is agricultural diesel still red?
I got this selection of colours from my ‘Y Termiadur’ (a rather large dictionary of technical terms published by the Welsh Assembly that I picked up for £5 from a second hand shop - bargin!)
primary colour = lliw sylfaenol
cool colours = lliw oeraidd
ultramarine = dulas
umber = wmber
brownish = brownaidd
reddish = cochlyd
red ochre = ocr coch
yellow ochre = ocr melyn
titanium white = gwyn titaniwm
crimson lake = llif rhuddgoch
bronze green = gwyrdd efydd
crimson = coch glas
lamp black = du lamp
sap green = gwyrdd sudd
Naples yellow = melyn Napoli
cadmium red = coch cadmiwm
cadmium scarlet = sgarlad cadmiwm
cadmium yellow = meln cadmiwm
(and finally brush stroke = stroc brwsh)
As an artist I had a quick rummage through by tubes of paint to try to match some of those colours up as well but none were in the dictionary, but I’m sure they could be constructed?
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i suddenly thought about which colours get named first. Are they not those we see most? Sky, some flowers - glas, grass - gwerdd, flowers - melyn, porffor, piws, coch, pinc… But as far as I know, no indigenous flower is oren! In fact, I’d guess that oranges were the first really orange things we saw I am not sure when marigolds arrived from ‘the Americas’ via France, but they were named for Mary’s gold! I think the flowers are melyn Mari?
I thought I was the only person in the world who remembered this. They were advertised quite extensively on television until the late 'seventies, weren’t they? I have recollections of catchy jingles during breaks in The Golden Shot.
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yes, the colour orange was indeed named after the fruit -
The word “orange” came about as a result of the Old French and Anglo-Norman French word “orenge,” derived from the old term for the fruit, pomme [apple!] d’orenge. (Like apples to oranges…)
The first known use of the word orange as fruit dates back to the 13th century, while the earliest recorded use of the word orange as a color goes back to the 16th century. However, it’s believed that even Old French borrowed the word from the Italian melarancio, meaning “fruit of the orange tree.”
