The whole ramble about #the cin vhetin problem makes me want to expand to other colours, but there weâd quickly run into planet-specific or species or colour vision specific associations.
On Earth, the most common metal ion used for oxygen transport is iron, which makes red the most common colour for blood (but not the only one: thereâs also green, blue, and colourless blood). Which then follows that red = colour of blood, bloodletting, often life, perhaps war or action; in different cultures the colour of weddings, war, or bravery.
Blue = the colour of skies and seas/water, but thatâs because of Earthâs oxygen rich atmosphere and abundant water. Planets with different atmospheres or less abundant free water (desert or ice planets) might disagree.
Green = colour of leaves and living things because of chlorophyll, but nothing says that chlorophyll is the molecule for photosynthesis on other planets (unless green plants were popular in ancient terraforming efforts).
Yellow = the colour of sun (our star is actually white, but can appear yellow/orange/red because of Rayleigh scattering), fire (because the carbon-based biomaterials we have historically burned for heat and light burn mostly yellow), or gold (which many historical cultures used as a medium of exchange).
There might be some universality to some of these, just based on chemistry. Oxidation is a powerful way of releasing chemical energy, and so far as we know, the only way to produce enough biochemical energy for complex life (but that could be our sample size of 1) and iron is particularly well-suited for transporting oxygen. And if oxygen and water are necessary for complex life, then planets that support life might have some similarities in their atmospheres and available water. Carbon really is great for building complex structural molecules and it does burn with a yellow flame, so fire = yellow/orange/red could be a fairly common association if not the only one.
But we have a sample size of 1, so I wouldnât say itâs strong evidence. Just considering the variety of colour visions on Earth, thereâs little guarantee that alien species galaxy over would agree what to associate a colour with. These might have weak correlations for humanoid species and humanoid-inhabitable planets, and they might or might not be relevant to Mandalorians. The colour meanings in mandalorian culture could very well be inherited from the Taung, who werenât human and lived on Coruscant (the biosphere of which has long since been destroyed, so who knows what grew there originally).
As it happens, we do have linguistic evidence that the Taung, original Mandalorians, or whoever spoke the language when it developed, did indeed bleed red (geâtal, red, lit. almost blood), and live on a planet with a blue sky (kebiiâtra, daytime, lit. blue space) and green plants (vorpanâoy, vegetation, lit. green life).
The one I find interesting is green = duty in combination with mandalorians historically being agricultural people. So the colour of green would have the implication of feeding your clan, because agriculture is a collaborative effort that produces food for a community, not an individual.
Blue = reliability either has nothing whatsoever to do with water, or else Mandalore historically had very reliable rains (like monsoons). It probably doesnât refer to river floods (like the Nile), because rivers tend not to be very blue (have you noticed that rivers are more often named black, dark, red, brown, etc. than blue?). Iâd also posit that traditional mandalorian agriculture would be more likely to be rainfall based than irrigation based, which would promote independent villages over centralised government. Reliability of blue could also have something to do with the permanence of skyâor the impermanence of it: viewed from the space, the atmosphere is the thinnest blue line yet all life on the planet relies on it to breathe. Or maybe itâs just a nice colour; Iâm not sure if thereâs an obvious connection here.
It would be very tempting to draw the connection between red = blood = honouring a parent, but I hesitate to do that because 1) mandalorians were and are aliens who may or may not have red blood, and 2) mandalorian family is not based on blood, at least not obligatorily. Even if there is a connection with blood, Iâd prefer to say itâs because of its connection with life. I.E. your parent didnât necessarily give you your life in the flesh and blood sense, but they did nurture you and teach you what it means to be a mandalorian and how to live your life. So red in mandalorian culture is perhaps a more figurative lifeâs blood.
The etymology of shiâyayc, âyellowâ, is unclear. Shi means âjust/onlyâ. âyayc could be from oyayc, âaliveâ, or it could be ya- + -yc. If it does come from âbarely aliveâ, it could be a reference to dying vegetation or flickering yellow flames. But Iâm going to go with this idea from @izzyovercoffee :
So, thereâs no word for orange in mandoâa at this time.
Consider: Yellow is sometimes indicated to also mean lust for life, depending on who you ask and what source material youâre comparing it to.
Itâs entirely possible that mandalorians donât have a way to differentiate between yellow and orange. Some cultures do display a limitation in language, seeing what we would consider a range (yellow to orange) as all one spectrum under the same banner.
So while Yellow may mean barely alive/barely dead, yellow may also mean nothing but life.
So Mandoâa doesnât have a word for orange, yet orange is used to symbolise shereshoy, an important mandalorian concept. Theyâve dedicated a whole colour to it in the same vein as justice, duty, reliability, honouring a parent, vengeance and remembering the fallen have their own colours. But thereâs no word for it? I call bullshit.
Isnât it more likely that âyellowâ is in fact a spectrum of colour from yellow to orange (like Yiddish blue/green) and the meaning is indeed related to both flames and the passion for life, i.e. âonly lifeâ = shereshoy.
ETA: It occurred to me that an alternative solution to the problem of not having a word for the colour orange would be to use the word âshereshoyâ itself. Kind of like English uses âorangeâ both for the fruit and the colour. âShereshoyâ comes from shereshir (âseizeâ) + oya- (the root for âliveâ and âhunt, chaseâ). Iâm not sure how youâd get from an abstract concept to the colour word, though, unless the connection is literally the colour used to paint armour.
