Light and colour

There are two ways of talking about light. One is « bright » and « dark »; the other separates how much light there is (la luminosidad), how hard it falls (la sombra proyectada) and what colour it brings with it (la dominante de color). Describing a room, a photograph or a painting needs the second. The word to carry away is el mate. English has two unrelated « mate »s: the companion, from the old word for somebody who shares your food, and the one at the end of a game of chess, which arrived through Arabic and Persian. Spanish el mate covers the chess one and the surface in this list, the one that does not reflect, but never the companion — that is el compañero. And in South America el mate is the drink, which is a third word again.