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I know that most of "why" questions don't make much sense as far as
linguistics are concerned but I'll ask anyway.

I know that き means a tree. いろ means color. It doesn't take a genius to guess
that きいろ (lit. tree color) should mean green. But it means yellow. Is there
any reason for this?
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2013-09-15T12:51:02.583
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2013-09-15T13:54:49.530
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question
meaning etymology colors
Why does きいろ mean yellow rather than green?
There was a word, 木色【きいろ】 "the colour of trees", recorded in the _Vocabulário
da Língua do Japão_. But actually, 黄【き】 on its own already means "yellow".

木 and 黄 are most likely _not_ etymologically related. We know that 木 had a
type-2 (乙類) /ki/ in Old Japanese. If we knew that 黄 had a type-1 (甲類) /ki/,
then we could definitively say that the two are etymologically unrelated. This
diagnostic is the reason why we say that 神【かみ】 and 上【かみ】 are unrelated words:
the former has a type-2 /mi/, while the latter has a type-1 /mi/. However, we
_do_ know the modern accentuation patterns of 木 and 黄, and they are different:

  * 木 is accented in modern standard Japanese, 黄 is not.
  * 木【きい】 is low register unaccented (→ LH) in modern Kyoto dialect, 黄【きい】 is high register unaccented (→ HH).

Assuming these continue a historical distinction, it seems safe to conclude
that 木 and 黄 were not the same word in Old Japanese as well.
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2013-09-15T13:32:36.417
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2013-09-15T13:54:49.530
2013-09-15T13:54:49.530
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answer