Indigo and Umami

[Julia Thompson]

On Tue, 22 Jul 2008, Mauro Diotallevi wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 10:04 PM, William T Goodall
> <wtg at wtgab.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> There used to be seven colours in a rainbow and four basic flavours
>> (sweet, sour, bitter, salt) and then indigo became a shade of violet
>> and umami became the fifth basic flavour.
>
> I thought that there were still 7 colors of the rainbow *including*
> indigo.  I learned the colors as ROY G BIV -- Red Orange Yellow Green
> Blue Indigo Violet.
>
> Or did you learn a different system?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo

"Color scientists do not usually recognize indigo as a significant color 
category, and generally classify wavelengths shorter than about 450 nm as 
violet."

Also, there's a source text from the 19th century at Wikipedia on this 
very question; the tinyurl for it is http://tinyurl.com/5f8afl

My resident color expert says it's just a word game.  :)  Then again, he 
knows more about color *science* than color *words*.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow#The_place_of_indigo
"All the Roy G. Biv mnemonics follow the tradition of including the colour 
indigo between blue and violet. Newton originally (1672) named only five 
primary colours: red, yellow, green, blue and violet. Only later did he 
introduce orange and indigo, giving seven colours by analogy to the number 
of notes in a musical scale. Some sources now omit indigo, because it 
is a tertiary color and partly due to the poor ability of humans to 
distinguish colours in the blue portion of the visual spectrum."

My kids' crayon boxes have red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet; if 
you buy a box of 8 crayons, you get all those but not indigo.  I 
personally conform to the crayon box school of "rainbow colors".

(Oh, and Resident Color Expert warns that magenta, pink and brown are 
*not* rainbow colors, just in case anyone thought any of them might be, or 
ought to be.)

 	Julia

Bored Enough To Write a Post This Long Maru