Recent place-name studies have accepted the "yellow moorland" derivation, but have struggled to understand how Helvellyn can be regarded as a yellow mountain. Colour, in the Celtic languages, is perceived differently from the way it is seen and described in modern English. For example, in Scottish Gaelic the spectrum of colours was "pastel rather than primary, gentle rather than bold."Peter Drummond, cited in John Murray, The Gaelic Landscape (see below) Colours were related to a landscape context in which blues, greens, greys and whites in particular were both more diverse and more differentiated than in English. People who relied on the system of transhumance for their livelihood gained the ability to assess the nutritional value of upland grasses from a distance before moving their stock to a summer shieling, and used appropriate colour terms for grasses which would become progressively more green as the spring advanced. Yellow, at least in Gaelic hill names, is not a bright colour. It describes hills which are distinguished by grasses such as Nardus stricta and Deschampsia flexuosa, both of which appear pale and bleached in winter. These grasses are common on the Helvellyn range, in an area where transhumance also used to be practiced. Nardus stricta in particular is an unpalatable and unproductive grass, and the Flora of Cumbria specifically notes a possible connection between areas of late snow cover and Nardus grassland at high elevations in the Helvellyn range. A name describing the mountain as "pale yellow moorland" is therefore meaningful in a Celtic context.
