How Appelblauwzeegroen became Teal in Belgian Dutch.

At first blush, Appelblauwzeegroen is an absurd color word.

But as I traced its etymology back to its creator, I discovered that it seemed to be a quite conscious decision on the part of an 19th century West Flemish lexicographer in order to celebrate and preserve his culture.

In Memoriam

Before beginning down this very random rabbithole, I would like to briefly mention Paul Boutin, an early supporter and avid reader of Colorphilia, who passed away on October 18th.

Paul was both a technology journalist and a rockstar, quite literally. We met nearly 15 years ago at a party in Venice (California) when he was writing for the New York Times' technology blog, and I inadvertedly insulted him by asking if there was a difference in editorial process between the printed paper and the blog.

His response turned into an conversation, which quickly blossomed into a beautiful friendship, which eventually had me dressing like an 80s glam rocker for his 50th birthday party, and flying out to Los Angeles in 2021 to watch him walk down the aisle to marry the love of his life (for the second time), Christina.

I've been working on archiving all of his written works, from all the various publications for whom he had written over the course of more than two decades, often while listening to tracks from his various albums.

While it would take me thousands of words to properly eulogize him, and many more to provide a retrospective on his opera, for right now, all I will say is, may his memory be for a blessing.

Colored Threads

Last week, I noticed an odd post of Threads which seemed to be an example of how, sometimes, algorithms seem to get one right every once in a while. It was the first post by a new user, posted into the tag of "ootd" or "outfit of the day", of a selfie of a gentleman decked out in a fully teal tracksuit, with the following text:

in Belgian Dutch the word for “teal” or “blauwgroen” is “appelblauwzeegroen” (apple blue sea green). someone’s gonna have to explain how the apple is closest to blue and the green closest to the sea. but maybe it more like: the colour is as blue as an apple and as green as the sea…

While I hadn't previously encountered the word appelblauwzeegroen, I knew enough to recognize a few problems with his assumptions.

Wiki

My first stop for getting a sense of words, even though I usually disagree with its etymologies, is Wiktionary. It provided a commonsense, cute etymology, which is the sort of thing that sounds good until you realize that it doesn't work.

From a mix of the components of the compounds appelgroen (“apple-green”) (a compound of appel (“apple”) + groen (“green”)) and zeeblauw (“sea-blue”) (a compound of zee (“sea”) + blauw (“blue”)).

We know the term blue-green or "blauwgroen" is telling us that the particular hue is located somewhere on the spectrum between those colors. So my hunch was that if we would identify the colors appelblauw and zeegroen, they would produce the endpoints of the spectrum in which teal would fall.

There is one other tiny problem. As I wrote last year, teal is a relatively new color, which is basically the same color as turquoise, but instead of being compared to a stone, it is compared to very specific plumage on a particular waterfowl called the teal.

It became a colorword during the late 19th century when people were obsessed with feathers in England and France, and was one of the colors which would then be synthesized in order to represent the feathers of the bird which no longer had to lose its life for the sake of fashion.

The Idiot's Guide to West Flemish

When looking up appelblauwzeegroen in an 1873 dictionary published in Bruges called the WestVlaamsch Idioticon (West Flemish Local Lexicon) by Leonard Lodewijk De Bo, a priest and lexicographer born in Beveren, West Flanders, therefore, as expected, it did not reference the color-word "teal" (which was literally not yet a color), but the French color word céladon.

Celadon

In the 17th century, rubans céladon had been previously translated to English as "pale green ribbons". Celadon was a shepherd Honoré d'Urfé's 1627 L'Astrée who were pale green ribbons, but he had apparently borrowed the character from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Celadon is another hue in the whole family of blue-green-grey colors that the invention of the color wheel decided wasn't important itself on its own. It is the Western name for a glaze which originated in the East and was meant to resemble the highly valued jade (without needing to use expensive jade pigment in the creation of the pottery).

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) would import porcelain with this color glaze in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was a very different color than the very distinctive Delft Blue, which was created using Cobalt Oxide.

Kitchen Sink

The same dictionary gives a second sense of the word, that it is more of a kitchen-sink color:

Dikwijls wordt het schertsende gebezigd om een onbestemd of vreemd kleur aan te duiden . Een kleed appelblauw-zeegroen, met fylia-morte striepen . Wat kleur had haar kleed? Appelblauw-zeegroen (d. i. een onbepaald kleur dat ik niet weet te noemen).

The term "appelblauw-zeegroen" is often used jokingly to indicate an unspecified or strange color. An appelblauw-zeegroen dress, with leaf-colored (dark yellow) stripes. What color was her dress? Appelblauw-zeegroen (i.e., an unspecified color that I don't know what to name).
Partially machine-generated translation

I really enjoy this explanation, partially because of the A-Z nature of the compound word appelblauw-zeegroen. This usage, even from the explanation, is a later adaptation of the meaning. 

Zeegroen (sea green)

This is the least problematic part (in my opinion) of the word appelblauwzeegroen, because the sea, according to many languages, is green. We've already seen Shakespeare alluding to Neptune's green coat.

Appelblauw (apple color)

I understood that understanding this word would be the key to making sense of this word. For example, while apples may not be blue, they have not always been associated with the color red. 

I have the start of a theory that the default apple became red with Walt Disney's technicolor masterpiece Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, which was based on the German folktale from the Brothers Grimm's Schneewittchen, which I've previously discussed specifically about how the word "fair" in English feels weird to the modern ears to talk about beautiful, but it was based on the German word Schoen, which plays nicely with the Schnee or snow.

But even more, as I wrote in my newsletter about darkness and the color blue last month, blauw is more associated with the word for color then a specific shade, without knowing what exactly that would be. As such, I would not be completely bothered about Appelblauw referring to a light-green apple. I would be wrong though.

The same late 19th century West Flemish dictionary gives two distinct definitions when it comes to do with the color appelblauw:

• an apple-blossom pink (a pale red color)
  I could rationalize why a pink (when thinking of the opacity of a color, and not the hue of a color) would be a color used to temper the sea-green, basically creating a light shade (appleblauw) of a sea green (zeegroen), as opposed to a dark shade of a sea green.
• gris de lin (a grey linen color)
  This one was much more confusing and made absolutely no sense on its own. I could understand associating many colors with an apple... besides grey.

Blauw (1658)

I would be remiss if I did not also mention that in a 1658 Dutch / English dictionary (published in Rotterdam), it is quite clear that blauw was also considered to be a grey color.

Blauw tusschen groen en wit, ofte grauw blauw,
A Blew betweene greene and white, or a Gray-blewe.
blauw-oogigh, Gray-eyed.

Modern Apple

Until I was reminded that the association of the default apple with the many varieties of the malus domestica is also a very modern concept. I've already dealt with pomme d'orange / malus aurea (golden apple) and pomegranate, as two examples. Pomme (FR) / Appel (NL) / Apfel (DE) / Apple (EN) / Malus (LA) were simply words for a "(spherical) fruit which grows on a tree".

Spherical

But like the biblical pomegranate, the pomme took on a very specific shape-related meaning in French, referring to the spherical butt of a sword. Subsequently, pomme took on an additional, related, meaning, referring to a specific spherical feature on an equestrian saddle.

Saddle

Then pomme became associated with the horse that that saddle would be ridden with, with the idea of a pommel horse ultimately become an abstraction of horse with saddle-like handles one would use in gymnastics.

Grey Horse

But the color of the ideal (living) pommel horse, at least in 17th century France, would be a light grey color, which is how the pomme / appel because associated with blauw, as a grey sky color in Belgian Dutch.

What I love about this is that if I hadn't tracked this word back throughout the centuries and across languages, there is no way that I would have even began to imagine such an etymology.

Grey-Green Glaze

What makes this even more beautiful, is that then the color of celadon is often described as a grey-green color. Is it that grey pigments are mixed with green pigments to transform the ferric iron oxide (Fe₂O₃₎ into a ferrous iron (FeO), or that the spectrum of colors range from the grey to the green?

From Celadon to Teal

When we began describing hues on their own, without any connection to their original context, we end up conflating celadon and teal, and then borrowing celadon's grey-green origin with the blue-green hue of the teal.

Especially as we already use the blue-green spectrum to describe teal, it becomes not so difficult for Belgian Dutch to simply extend the previous known term of appelblauw-zeegroen to include the color teal, which can often look quite similar to celadon.

Why Belgian Dutch?

Why did Belgian Dutch develop a different word for this?

As far as I can tell, Netherlandish Dutch did not develop the same connection between for appel also taking on the association of the word for horse, because they were not as connected to the French.

Which is where something gets a little weirder. It seems that the word appelblauwzeegroen is a near perfect translation to the way that the French described the color céladon.

According to the 1881 Dictionnaire encyclopédique et biographique de l'industrie et des arts industriels:

sa couleur varie du gris-roussâtre au vert de mer plus ou moins foncé.
its color varies from reddish-gray to more or less dark sea green.
emphasis added

I say near perfect, because this would mean that appel would actually be a reddish color, blauw would be grey, and zeegroen would be sea green. Somehow, both entries in the the dual meaning of appelblauw in De Bo's 1873 West Flemish dictionary are part of the definition.

The True Meaning of Appelblauwzeegroen

I wanted to learn more about Leonard Lodewijk De Bo, and I went to the English Wikipedia, and found nothing. I discovered that there are only languages on Wikipedia that have an entry for him: Dutch, West-Flemish, and Catalan.

The irony is that the Catalan text, I found a fascinating quote from his introduction to his dictionary, and I went back to the source and used Google translate to translate from the original, because it explains why he created a word in West Flemish which was a direct translation from the French.

It has often been said that the Flemish language has two great enemies: one that destroys it and one that wants to corrupt it, namely: the influence of French, to which we inevitably lean, through daily contact, material interests, the fashion or necessity of being able to speak French, and for other reasons as well; and the influence of High German, which is gradually changing the nature of Dutch to the point that it is now practically incomprehensible in French Flanders.

But West Flemish in particular has a third enemy, more dangerous than the other two: the malicious language of some who constantly repeat that the West Flemish dialect is a vulgar language and pure provincialism. Moreover, these accusations, however unfounded, deceive the ignorant, steal the respect and affection they should have for their dialect, and thus facilitate the entry of other enemies; for, experience shows, a West Fleming begins to follow the French or German style the more he loses respect for his own language.

Moreover, those who vigorously wish to free the West Fleming from foreign influence have always diligently endeavored to preserve and strengthen the love and respect for his dialect in his heart, by wisely clarifying it and advocating ample space for its best words and turns of phrase in the written language.

Yes, Appelblauwzeegroen is an absurd name for a color, for many reasons. But it is a word which synthesizes the two senses of Appelblauw - the French and Dutch - to celebrate the culture which lives between the two languages.

And that is a beautiful thing.