A Question about Color Terms
Joseph W. Murphy
it baffles me. Can someone explain what the author (Andrew Dalby from
page 269 of his book, Language in Danger) means when he says:
"...Malotki claims to have shown in _Hopi Time_ that languages always
have to deal with time in some way, and no doubt he is right: that is
a universal. Numerous investigations of colour terms show beyond a
doubt that you can predict, from the number of colour terms a language
has, which particular colours will be named: that also is a
universal..."
What is the difference here between "colour terms" and "colour names"
Also, can you give an example as to how the one is predictive of the
other?
Thanks!
Joe Murphy
Boy Linguist
Phil Healey
> I chanced upon a sentence concerning "color terms" in a language and
> it baffles me. Can someone explain what the author (Andrew Dalby from
> page 269 of his book, Language in Danger) means when he says:
>
> "...Malotki claims to have shown in _Hopi Time_ that languages always
> have to deal with time in some way, and no doubt he is right: that is
> a universal. Numerous investigations of colour terms show beyond a
> doubt that you can predict, from the number of colour terms a language
> has, which particular colours will be named: that also is a
> universal..."
>
> What is the difference here between "colour terms" and "colour names"
Nothing.
> Also, can you give an example as to how the one is predictive of the
> other?
I forget now, but languages can be grouped according to how many color
names they have and if they only have two, for example, it's black and
white. If they have three, it's black and white and red, if four, then
black, white, red, and yellow. (I'm pulling those colors out of a very
rusty memory.) If there's five, then there's some variation: black,
white, red, yellow, and blue OR green (or something like that).
For some reason it's very regular.
Joseph W. Murphy
Thanks for the explanation! It clarified things enough to allow me to
do a little more digging.
Crystal has a good synopsis in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
at p. 106.
Apparently English has 11 basic colors: white, black, red, green,
yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey.
white < green < purple
black < red < yellow <blue <brown < pink
< orange
< grey
If a language has a term to the right of a "<", it will have all of
the terms to the left.
There are some variations.
Crystal says Latin had no generic terms for "brown" or "grey".
Russian, distinguishes between sinii and goluboi -- dark blue and sky
blue.
Hungarian has two basic terms for red.
How interesting!
Bobby D. Bryant
> Joseph W. Murphy wrote:
>
>> Also, can you give an example as to how the one is predictive of the
>> other?
>
> I forget now, but languages can be grouped according to how many color
> names they have and if they only have two, for example, it's black and
> white. If they have three, it's black and white and red, if four, then
> black, white, red, and yellow. (I'm pulling those colors out of a very
> rusty memory.) If there's five, then there's some variation: black,
> white, red, yellow, and blue OR green (or something like that).
>
> For some reason it's very regular.
I would guess that it is a result of perception and cognition, rather than
a linguistic phenomenon per se.
--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Phil Healey <com.hotmail@psa_healey> wrote:
>
> >Joseph W. Murphy wrote:
> >
> >> I chanced upon a sentence concerning "color terms" in a language and
> >> it baffles me. Can someone explain what the author (Andrew Dalby from
> >> page 269 of his book, Language in Danger) means when he says:
> >>
> >> "...Malotki claims to have shown in _Hopi Time_ that languages always
> >> have to deal with time in some way, and no doubt he is right: that is
> >> a universal. Numerous investigations of colour terms show beyond a
> >> doubt that you can predict, from the number of colour terms a language
> >> has, which particular colours will be named: that also is a
> >> universal..."
> >>
> >> What is the difference here between "colour terms" and "colour names"
> >
> >Nothing.
Perhaps by "color terms" he intends Berlin & Kay's "basic color terms"
and by "color names" all names for colors, both basic and derived.
Taken from Berlin & Kay; Crystal certainly gives the ref.; see current
Japanese color thread.
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
Joseph W. Murphy
Phil Healy said:
>> I forget now, but languages can be grouped according to how many color
>> names they have and if they only have two, for example, it's black and
>> white. If they have three, it's black and white and red, if four, then
>> black, white, red, and yellow. (I'm pulling those colors out of a very
>> rusty memory.) If there's five, then there's some variation: black,
>> white, red, yellow, and blue OR green (or something like that).
>>
>> For some reason it's very regular.
>
>
And Bobby D. Bryant wrote:
>I would guess that it is a result of perception and cognition, rather than
>a linguistic phenomenon per se.
>
Can you elaborate a little on what you mean here? Can't everyone see
the same colors? If so, why do some cultures have generic names for
only some of them?
Joe Murphy
Boy Linguist
Larry Trask
The topic here is the work originally published in Brent Berlin and
Paul Kay, 1969, Basic Color Terms. (A slightly revised edition is now
in print.)
B & K's work initiated an enormous literature, some of it tending to
confirm their conclusions, while other work has tended to falsify
those conclusions.
> Apparently English has 11 basic colors: white, black, red, green,
> yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey.
>
> white < green < purple
> black < red < yellow <blue <brown < pink
> < orange
> < grey
>
> If a language has a term to the right of a "<", it will have all of
> the terms to the left.
>
> There are some variations.
There are now quite a few counterexamples known. The most prominent
defender of B & K's work, the anthropologist Robert MacLaury, has
dealt with many apparent counterexamples by demonstrating that some
systems of color terms involve, or are entirely based on, features
other than hue.
One important modification involves 'grey': it now appears that this
term is a wild card which can be introduced at almost any point.
> Crystal says Latin had no generic terms for "brown" or "grey".
The received view is that Latin had basic color terms only for
'black', 'white', 'red', 'yellow', 'green' and 'blue', though it had
more than one term for some of these. John Lyons argues that one of
the 'yellow' terms really meant 'brown', but no one seems to agree
with him.
> Russian, distinguishes between sinii and goluboi -- dark blue and sky
> blue.
MacLaury has tried to argue that only one of these is basic, but I
don't find his case convincing. The same distinction has been claimed
for several other languages, including Italian (<azzurro> and <blu>),
Modern Greek (<ghalazios> and <ble>), and Turkish (<mavi> and
<lacivert>). Yusuf, would you regard both these terms as basic?
> Hungarian has two basic terms for red.
MacLaury has argued that one of these, <piros> 'dark red', is not
basic, and in this case I find his arguments convincing. The piece of
the color surface assigned to <piros> by Hungarian-speakers is
vanishingly small, and MacLaury argues that this non-basic term is
simply culturally salient because of its association with sinister
passions.
And, of course, French famously has two terms for 'brown', <marron>
and <brun>. There is a significant literature on these terms alone.
It has been established that regional varieties of French differ
substantially in the way they use these terms, and a couple of
linguists have concluded that <marron> is slowly driving <brun> out of
the language.
> How interesting!
Systems of color terms are fascinating. Even if B & K's conclusions
fail to stand up, the authors deserve our thanks for initiating an
extraordinarily interesting and fruitful investigation.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Peter T. Daniels
>
> jwmur...@mindspring.com (Joseph W. Murphy) wrote in message news:<3ff236d9...@news.east.earthlink.net>...
>
> The topic here is the work originally published in Brent Berlin and
> Paul Kay, 1969, Basic Color Terms. (A slightly revised edition is now
> in print.)
The main difference is that it's _much_ cheaper and has more color
plates. Don't they also address some of the criticism?
Larry Trask
> Can you elaborate a little on what you mean here? Can't everyone see
> the same colors? If so, why do some cultures have generic names for
> only some of them?
*Everybody* has names for only some of them. We can discriminate
colors almost without limit, but no language comes remotely close to
having as many lexicalized color terms as we can distinguish colors.
In fact, most languages get by with very few color terms. The steady
proliferation of color terms in European languages has a great deal to
do with technology, as a steadily greater range of dyes and pigments
became available over the centuries. The riot of color that we are
used to today in manufactured products is a very recent development.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Larry Trask
Judeo-Spanish, the language of the descendants of the Jews who were
expelled from Spain in 1492. These descendants live in Turkey, and
their color terms have recently been described by a linguist named
Varol.
These people are trilingual. Judeo-Spanish is the mother tongue,
while Turkish is the language of everyday affairs, and French is the
language of culture.
Inherited from Old Spanish are <blanko> 'white', <amariyo> 'yellow'
and <vedre> 'green'. Inherited <negro> is now confined to the sense
'bad, evil' and is no longer a color term, while 'black' is <preto>,
borrowed from Portuguese (by what route Varol doesn't say). Old
Spanish <roxo> has been lost, and 'red' is <korolado>, from the other
Spanish word for 'red', <colorado>, though Turkish <al> finds some
limited use.
There is no single word for 'blue'. Inherited <azul> is dead, though
it is entered in some dictionaries, and Varol found one elderly
speaker who recognized it. The ordinary words are <mavi>, from
Turkish, and <blu>, from French or Italian. Unassimilated French
<bleu> finds some use, and Varol encountered one instance of <syel>,
from French <ciel> 'sky'.
For 'pink', we find both <roz>, from French, and <pembe>, from
Turkish. The first is used more by older speakers, the second more by
younger speakers.
Three terms of severely limited use are <gri> 'grey' and <bej>
'beige', both from Turkish, which took them from French, and <marron>
'brown', taken directly from French.
There is no term for 'orange', though one source reports that <pembe>
'pink' can be applied to orange things.
One last term is <zurzuvi> 'of an indescribable color', of unknown
origin; use of this always provokes laughter.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
benlizross
Kay has a web site with a number of papers on post-BCT work:
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/
The "World Color Survey", as it's now called, seems at the very least to
have a much more credible data base. There's a fairly recent summary in
C.L.Hardin & Luisa Maffi (eds), Color categories in thought and language
(CUP, 1997), which also includes views by psychologists,
anthropologists, etc.
Ross Clark
John A. Rea
Larry Trask wrote:
> jwmur...@mindspring.com (Joseph W. Murphy) wrote in message news:<3ff236d9...@news.east.earthlink.net>...
>
> And, of course, French famously has two terms for 'brown', <marron>
^^^^^^
> and <brun>. There is a significant literature on these terms alone.
^^^^
> It has been established that regional varieties of French differ
> substantially in the way they use these terms, and a couple of
> linguists have concluded that <marron> is slowly driving <brun> out of
> the language.
>
> Larry Trask
> lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Jack
John A. Rea
Larry Trask wrote:
> jwmur...@mindspring.com (Joseph W. Murphy) wrote in message
news:<3ff236d9...@news.east.earthlink.net>...
>
>>Crystal says Latin had no generic terms for "brown" or "grey".
That would appear to mean that Romans couldn't say that, "At night
all cats are gray / grey." Of course, they may only have been
familiar with the "Egyptian" type of cat, not the later invaders
from the east.
Jack
>
> Larry Trask
> lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Miguel Carrasquer
>Inherited <negro> is now confined to the sense
>'bad, evil' and is no longer a color term, while 'black' is <preto>,
>borrowed from Portuguese (by what route Varol doesn't say).
If the loss of /j/ after /r/ is normal, there is no need for a Portuguese
borrowing. Spa. <prieto> means "black, dark", especially in older sources,
and in Latin America.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
m...@wxs.nl
Larry Trask
> On 31 Dec 2003 11:19:18 -0800, lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote:
>
> >Inherited <negro> is now confined to the sense
> >'bad, evil' and is no longer a color term, while 'black' is <preto>,
> >borrowed from Portuguese (by what route Varol doesn't say).
>
> If the loss of /j/ after /r/ is normal, there is no need for a Portuguese
> borrowing. Spa. <prieto> means "black, dark", especially in older sources,
> and in Latin America.
Miguel, this is very interesting. If I recall correctly what
Corominas says, he reports that <prieto> got as far as 'dark' in
Spanish but that it never became an established color term meaning
'black'.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Larry Trask
> > jwmur...@mindspring.com (Joseph W. Murphy) wrote in message
> news:<3ff236d9...@news.east.earthlink.net>...
> >
> >>Crystal says Latin had no generic terms for "brown" or "grey".
>
> That would appear to mean that Romans couldn't say that, "At night
> all cats are gray / grey." Of course, they may only have been
> familiar with the "Egyptian" type of cat, not the later invaders
> from the east.
Latin did have a word for 'grey' of sorts. This was <canens>, but
this word is merely the participle of the verb <canere> 'be grey, be
hoary', and as far as I know it was applied only to hair and beards.
Latinists?
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
>
> Jack
>
> >
> > Larry Trask
> > lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Javier BF
> 'pink' can be applied to orange things.
If so, then the meaning of that 'pembe' should
rather be described as "colour lighter than proper
red whose lighternesss is indistinctively induced
by the mixing of red perception with blue-white,
white, yellow-white or yellow", because English
'pink' cannot be applied to orange things (*).
Cheers,
Javier
(*) English 'pink': "colour lighter than proper red
whose lighterness is induced by a mixing of red
perception with white alone or with white combined
with blue (or yellow **)"
(**) The mix of red with white and yellow is 'salmon',
the borderline colour between pink and orange which
I'm not sure whether English speakers classify as a
variety of 'pink', 'orange' or 'red' (or none, or "it
all depends on the amount of white, yellow and red
mixing in each particular instance of salmon for that
particular instance to be classified as a kind of pink,
orange or red"). In Spanish, it is classified as
a variety of 'rosa': 'color salmón' = 'color rosa
salmón' = 'rosa salmón'.
Peter T. Daniels
The fish salmon is widely available in US markets, and its flesh isn't
particularly variable in color, so there's a standard reference point
for the color name. That would seem to be a characteristic of derived
color names, no?
J. W. Love
>Latin did have a word for 'grey' of sorts. This was
><canens>, but this word is merely the participle of the
>verb <canere> 'be grey, be hoary', and as far as I
>know it was applied only to hair and beards. Latinists?
For <ca:neo:>, Lewis & Short, via Persius, has (omitting macrons):
<<caneo , ui, 2, v. n. [canus] , to be gray or hoary, be white (poet. or in
post-Aug. prose); P. a.: canens , entis, gray, grayish, hoary, white:
temporibus geminis canebat sparsa senectus, Verg. A. 5, 416 ; cf. Tac. G. 31:
canens senecta, Verg. A. 10, 192 : canet in igne cinis, Ov. A. A. 2, 440 :
canens gelu,white, id. Tr. 5, 2, 66 ; Sil. 1, 206; pruina, id. 3, 534 :
canentia lilia, Ov. M. 12, 411 : dum gramina canent, Verg. G. 3, 325 ; 2, 13:
canuerint herbae, Ov. F. 3, 880 ; Juv. 14, 144; Ov. M. 1, 110 (cf. id. ib. 6,
456; and id. F. 5, 357); Sil. 4, 362.>>
As you see, things other than hair & beards that were "canens" were old age
(senecta), ashes (cinis), hoarfrost (pruina), lilies (lilia), grasses
(gramina), and herbage (herba).
But why go with the participle when a related and perfectly ordinary adjective,
<ca:nus>, is available? Again L&S from Perseus (omitting macrons), which
documents the term applied to streams/floods/waves (fluctus), water (aqua),
snow (nix), icy coldness (gelu), mountains (montes), hoarfrost, hail
(grandine), willow-beds (salicta), grainfields (segetes), tops of growing grain
(aristae), a wolf (lupus), embers (favilla), a horse's color (color equi),
?tufts of trees (arborum villi):
<<canus , a, um, adj. [Sanscr. Kas-, to shine; cf. cascus] , white, hoary
(mostly poet.).
I. Lit.: fluctus, Lucr. 2, 767 ; Cic. Arat. 71; hence aqua,foamy, frothy, Ov.
H. 2, 16 : nix,white, Lucr. 3, 21 ; Hor. S. 2, 5, 41: gelu, Verg. G. 3, 442 :
montes, id. ib. 1, 43 : pruina,hoar-frost, Hor. C. 1, 4, 4 : grandine canus
Athos, Ov. Ib. 200 : salicta, id. M. 5, 590 : segetes, id. ib. 10, 655 :
aristae, id. ib. 6, 456 : lupus, id. ib. 6, 527 ; 7, 550: favilla, id. ib. 8,
524 : color equi, Pall. Mart. 14, 4 : arborum villi, Plin. 12, 23, 50, § 108 :
situs, id. 12, 25, 55, § 125 .--
B. Esp. freq. of the gray hair of the aged: cano capite atque alba barba,
Plaut. Bacch. 5, 1, 15 ; id. As. 5, 2, 84; Cat. 68, 124; Tib. 1, 1, 72; Ov. F.
5, 57: capilli, Hor. C. 2, 11, 15 ; Ov. M. 1, 266; 2, 30; 4, 474; Phaedr. 2, 2,
10: crinis, Cat. 64, 350 ; Ov. M. 13, 427: barba, Mart. 4, 36 al. --Hence,
subst. in plur.: cani , orum, m. (sc. capilli), gray hairs: non cani, non rugae
repente auctoritatem arripere possunt, Cic. Sen. 18, 62 ; Ov. M. 3, 275; in
Aug. and post-Aug. poets (esp. freq. in Ovid) with adjj.: falsi, Ov. M. 6, 26 :
honorati, id. ib. 8, 9 : positi, id. ib. 14, 655 : rari, id. ib. 8, 567 : sui,
id. ib. 10, 391 : miseri, Pers. 5, 65 : venerandi. Sen. Herc. Fur.
1249.--Hence,
II. Transf., of age and of aged persons. old, aged: senectus,hoary, Cat.
108, 1 : anilitas, id. 61, 162 : amator, Tib. 1, 8, 29 : cana veritas,
venerable, Varr. ap. Non. p. 243, 1: Fides, Verg. A. 1, 292 : Vesta, id. ib. 5,
744 .>>
Btw, don't anybody confuse <ca:neo:> 'be white, gray, hoary' with <caneo:>
'sing' (as in "Arma virumque cano").
Jacob in DC. (Bear in mind I'm just an amateur here, not an expert.)
J. W. Love
[Joseph W. Murphy wrote:]
>>Apparently English has 11 basic colors: white, black,
>>red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange
>>and grey.
>>
>> white < green < purple
>> black < red < yellow <blue <brown < pink
>> < orange
>> < grey
>>
>>If a language has a term to the right of a "<", it will
>>have all of the terms to the left. There are some variations.
>There are now quite a few counterexamples known. The most
>prominent defender of B & K's work, the anthropologist
>Robert MacLaury, has dealt with many apparent
>counterexamples by demonstrating that some systems of color
>terms involve, or are entirely based on, features other than hue.
Samoan seems to challenge B&K's system (as charted above) in having brown and
gray, but neither green nor blue nor grue.* I'm not sure that <`ena`ena>
'brown' and <`efu`efu> 'gray' are based on "features other than hue," though
<efuefu> 'dust, powder' (N.B., without the glottal) tempted Milner into
suggesting a possible cognatic relationship. Ross, do reconstructions at
various levels of Austronesian shed light on this issue?
*There is, however, a bound form, <-usi>, which indicates grue and stands
formally in parallel with the suffixes <-mea> 'reddish-brownish', <-tea>
'light-colored', and <-ui> 'dark-colored'.
J. W. Love
>Latin did have a word for 'grey' of sorts. This was
><canens>, but this word is merely the participle of the
>verb <canere> 'be grey, be hoary', and as far as I
>know it was applied only to hair and beards. Latinists?
For <ca:neo:>, Lewis & Short, via Perseus, has (omitting macrons):
Peter T. Daniels
> Jacob in DC. (Bear in mind I'm just an amateur here, not an expert.)
Yet unlike many far less modest posters, you managed to find an
appropriate reference work from a reliable website and quote exactly the
relevant data (as well as the caveat about singing, though not dogs).
Joseph W. Murphy
Hmmm...so "canus" (gray/grey) appears to have been used pretty widely
in Latin. But if it is widely used, and isn't a borrowed term, then
why isn't it regarded as a "basic color term"?
I guess I'm confused as to what is and what isn't included within the
meaning of "basic color term". Can anyone explain this to me? Sorry
in advance if I'm appearing obtuse.
Joe Murphy
Boy Linguist
Peter T. Daniels
> Hmmm...so "canus" (gray/grey) appears to have been used pretty widely
> in Latin. But if it is widely used, and isn't a borrowed term, then
> why isn't it regarded as a "basic color term"?
>
> I guess I'm confused as to what is and what isn't included within the
> meaning of "basic color term". Can anyone explain this to me? Sorry
> in advance if I'm appearing obtuse.
If you don't ask, how will you learn?
Basic color terms are words that denote only colors and aren't derived
from anything else (hence Javier's tantrums about "orange"; what isn't
clear in English is whether the word denoted the color or the fruit
first, though there's no question of its etymology from a word for the
fruit). Thus the English color words salmon, turquoise, umber, lemon,
etc. aren't basic color terms; the vast majority of color words around
the world are derived color terms.
Joseph W. Murphy
Thanks for the explanation!. I think I understand now. So my follow
up question would be for the Latin scholars here.
Is "canus" a "derived" color term? From "canis" (dog-colored?) maybe?
Or does it come from the verb "canere" (to be grey or white)?
Or is it a "basic" term (i.e., with "canere" being derived from
"canus" for example, and not the other way around )?
By the way, I found this interesting factoid from a web search on
"basic color terms":
The opening shot (in the color controversy) was fired by William
Gladstone, the British politician and Homeric scholar. He pointed out
that abstract color terminology was virtually absent from Homer's
work, and claimed that the Greeks had no sense of color at all, having
only the ability to distinguish light from dark. He believed "... that
the organ of color and its impressions were but partially developed
among the Greeks of the heroic age"--i.e., the Greeks were
physiologically incapable of perceiving color.
(Which would make Eos' rosy fingers imperceptible to the likes of
Achilles and Odysseus, I guess.)
Joe Murphy
Boy Linguist
Nath Rao
> Basic color terms are words that denote only colors and aren't derived
> from anything else (hence Javier's tantrums about "orange"; what isn't
> clear in English is whether the word denoted the color or the fruit
> first, though there's no question of its etymology from a word for the
> fruit).
But, doesn't this open a big hole? For major (European) languages, the
theory pays attention to psychology of native speakers, whereas for
other languages, field linguists and dictionaries take precedence.
How do we know that that the latter aren't biased by theory?
And, without etymology, is it easy to tell which came first? For
example, in Modern Tamil, bleach is often referred to as ``ni:lam''
which is also the word for blue. The connection is that a major
brand of bleach is dyed blue. From the recorded history, we know that
the word ``ni:lam'' is older than bleach [it comes from the word for
indigo plant, and has shifted meaning from dark blue/blue-black to
standard blue]. If Tamil were spoken only by a few thousand people
in a small area without a recorded literature, how would we know which
came first?
Nath Rao
benlizross
But is that "derived from" historically or synchronically? If it's the
former, then there's no way a derived term can ever become a basic term,
right? If it's the latter, you've got slippery problems deciding which
of two senses is primary for living speakers (or if they're
independent). "Orange" is the tricky one in English. "Pink" is also,
IIRC, derived from a flower, but probably not one English speaker in 100
knows that. I guess this is less of a difficulty in languages with more
derivational morphology.
Actually I seem to recall that this criterion had been dropped from more
recent versions of the definition, leaving the main criteria that a BCT
is not included in any other CT, and that its application is not
restricted to a small range of objects (cows, hair, etc).
Ross Clark
Joseph W. Murphy
Crystal's comments about Berlin & Kay's work sheds some light on what
they considered a "basic color term":
"'Basic' was interpreted to mean that the terms used only a single
morpheme (excluding _light brown_ etc.), were in common use (excluding
_indigo_), applied to many objects (excluding _blond_) and were not
contained within another colour (excluding _scarlet_)."
Joe Murphy
Boy Linguist
benlizross
>
> Larry wrote:
> [Joseph W. Murphy wrote:]
>
> >>Apparently English has 11 basic colors: white, black,
> >>red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange
> >>and grey.
> >>
> >> white < green < purple
> >> black < red < yellow <blue <brown < pink
> >> < orange
> >> < grey
> >>
> >>If a language has a term to the right of a "<", it will
> >>have all of the terms to the left. There are some variations.
>
> >There are now quite a few counterexamples known. The most
> >prominent defender of B & K's work, the anthropologist
> >Robert MacLaury, has dealt with many apparent
> >counterexamples by demonstrating that some systems of color
> >terms involve, or are entirely based on, features other than hue.
>
> Samoan seems to challenge B&K's system (as charted above) in having brown and
> gray, but neither green nor blue nor grue.* I'm not sure that <`ena`ena>
> 'brown' and <`efu`efu> 'gray' are based on "features other than hue," though
> <efuefu> 'dust, powder' (N.B., without the glottal) tempted Milner into
> suggesting a possible cognatic relationship. Ross, do reconstructions at
> various levels of Austronesian shed light on this issue?
Alas, even at the Polynesian level I have never been able to shed much
light on it. There are obvious basic terms for white (*tea) and black
(*'uli), a couple for red (*mea, *kula) and a number of others whose
meanings often vary alarmingly from one language to another. So your
'grey' word is from *kefu, which in Maori and some other languages
describes only hair of a lighter than normal colour (often 'red'), but
in others is apparently a basic colour word 'brown' or 'blue-green'.
*kena, from which your 'brown' word comes, most often refers to lighter
or pale colours, sometimes even white, but in some languages again
specifically associated with hair, which rules it out as a BCT.
> *There is, however, a bound form, <-usi>, which indicates grue and stands
> formally in parallel with the suffixes <-mea> 'reddish-brownish', <-tea>
> 'light-colored', and <-ui> 'dark-colored'.
Yes *'usi does seem like a good candidate for an original 'grue' term,
but perhaps only for the darker shades.
The terms given as equivalents for blue and green in modern
introductions to Samoan are lanu meamata ('colour of unripe things') and
lanu moana ('sea colour') or lanu puluu, right? These are pretty clearly
recent formations.
Ross Clark
Spam
> Javier BF wrote:
>>
>> I'm not sure whether English speakers classify as a
>> variety of 'pink', 'orange' or 'red' (or none, or "it
>> all depends on the amount of white, yellow and red
>> mixing in each particular instance of salmon for that
>> particular instance to be classified as a kind of pink,
>> orange or red"). In Spanish, it is classified as
>> a variety of 'rosa': 'color salmón' = 'color rosa
>> salmón' = 'rosa salmón'.
>
> The fish salmon is widely available in US markets, and its flesh isn't
> particularly variable in color, so there's a standard reference point
> for the color name. That would seem to be a characteristic of derived
> color names, no?
For me (German), the color of the flesh of actual salmon are sometimes
pink, sometimes orange. The color term salmon seems (to me, at least in
German) to refer to the pinkish end of that spectrum.
Oliver C.
Douglas G. Kilday
"Joseph W. Murphy" <jwmur...@mindspring.com> wrote in message ...
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> >Joseph W. Murphy wrote:
> >
> >> Hmmm...so "canus" (gray/grey) appears to have been used pretty widely
> >> in Latin. But if it is widely used, and isn't a borrowed term, then
> >> why isn't it regarded as a "basic color term"?
> >>
> >> I guess I'm confused as to what is and what isn't included within the
> >> meaning of "basic color term". Can anyone explain this to me? Sorry
> >> in advance if I'm appearing obtuse.
> >
> >If you don't ask, how will you learn?
> >
> >Basic color terms are words that denote only colors and aren't derived
> >from anything else (hence Javier's tantrums about "orange"; what isn't
> >clear in English is whether the word denoted the color or the fruit
> >first, though there's no question of its etymology from a word for the
> >fruit). Thus the English color words salmon, turquoise, umber, lemon,
> >etc. aren't basic color terms; the vast majority of color words around
> >the world are derived color terms.
According to Peter's definition <black> is not a "basic" color term, since
it is derived (without borrowing) from PGmc *<blakaz> 'burnt', itself
derived from PIE *<bheleg-> 'to shine, flash, burn', whose other reflexes
include L. <flagra:re> 'to burn' and Gr. <phlóx> 'flame'. Perhaps it takes a
thoroughly modern linguist, a real ultra-post-Bloomfieldian, to comprehend
what a "basic" color term is?
> Thanks for the explanation!. I think I understand now. So my follow
> up question would be for the Latin scholars here.
>
> Is "canus" a "derived" color term? From "canis" (dog-colored?) maybe?
> Or does it come from the verb "canere" (to be grey or white)?
> Or is it a "basic" term (i.e., with "canere" being derived from
> "canus" for example, and not the other way around )?
It is indeed a "basic" term (as far as that means anything). The verb is
derived from the adjective, whose attested form <ca:nus> is from *<casnos>.
Related Italic words are Paelignian <casnar> 'old man' and Sabine <cascus>
'old' (cited by Varro), showing that the semantic extension 'gray' -> 'gray
with age, hoary' -> 'old' was not restricted to Latin.
Comparison of Indo-European cognates gives 'gray' or 'gray-brown' as the
earliest recoverable sense of PIE */k^as-/. The most common secondary sense
is 'hare' which appears to have developed independently in several branches
of IE, judging by the variation in root-extensions.
> By the way, I found this interesting factoid from a web search on
> "basic color terms":
>
> The opening shot (in the color controversy) was fired by William
> Gladstone, the British politician and Homeric scholar. He pointed out
> that abstract color terminology was virtually absent from Homer's
> work, and claimed that the Greeks had no sense of color at all, having
> only the ability to distinguish light from dark. He believed "... that
> the organ of color and its impressions were but partially developed
> among the Greeks of the heroic age"--i.e., the Greeks were
> physiologically incapable of perceiving color.
>
> (Which would make Eos' rosy fingers imperceptible to the likes of
> Achilles and Odysseus, I guess.)
If Gladstone actually said that, he was no Homeric scholar at all, and never
actually read the epics in Greek. I recall a similarly inane statement from
a very idiotic book on thinking which I once read (I think it was "Patterns
of Thinking: a Briefer Edition"). It was claimed that Latin did not
distinguish blue from green and that "to Homer, the sea was the color of
wine". The first claim is based on poetic use of <viride mare> 'green sea'
and the like; it should be obvious that the sea has no intrinsic color and
can certainly appear green under some conditions. The second is based on a
very widespread mistranslation 'wine-dark sea' for <oínopa pónton> (acc.)
'wine-resembling high sea' (sea near shore is <thálassa>, not <póntos>). No
comparison of color or shade is implied by the suffix <-ops>; the expression
compares the overall impression of the calm sea with the surface of wine in
a bowl. 'Wine-dark' would have been *<oinodnephé:s> or the like, not
<oínops>. As always, careless citation leads to cascading errors.
Douglas G. Kilday
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message ...
>
> [...]
>
> The fish salmon is widely available in US markets, and its flesh isn't
> particularly variable in color, so there's a standard reference point
> for the color name. That would seem to be a characteristic of derived
> color names, no?
Add grocery-shopping to the list of topics you know nothing about. Canned
salmon comes in red and pink varieties, of which the former is much more
expensive than the latter.
As for the question, the answer is "No". Taupe, for example, is supposed to
be the color of moles. Which species of mole? The adult or juvenile? The
under or upper side? The color of the living mole, or of the processed
moleskin? Some standard reference point!
Peter T. Daniels
>
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message ...
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > The fish salmon is widely available in US markets, and its flesh isn't
> > particularly variable in color, so there's a standard reference point
> > for the color name. That would seem to be a characteristic of derived
> > color names, no?
>
> Add grocery-shopping to the list of topics you know nothing about. Canned
> salmon comes in red and pink varieties, of which the former is much more
> expensive than the latter.
In the places _I've_ lived, salmon is sold at the fish counter or by
what's not called a fishmonger, and you don't have to open a can to
learn its color.
> As for the question, the answer is "No". Taupe, for example, is supposed to
> be the color of moles. Which species of mole? The adult or juvenile? The
> under or upper side? The color of the living mole, or of the processed
> moleskin? Some standard reference point!
You claim that "taupe" is a word for 'mole'?
Maybe that explains why, when the minister at my cousin's wedding a few
years ago came back in to ask someone to move the "taupe" Saturn out of
her way, neither I with my charcoal Saturn nor my other cousin (Hervé,
actually) with his dark red Saturn knew which car she meant.
Can _you_ tell which one she meant?
Peter T. Daniels
Shades, or foreshadowings, of Julian Jaynes!
> (Which would make Eos' rosy fingers imperceptible to the likes of
> Achilles and Odysseus, I guess.)
Not to mention the wine-dark sea ...
> Joe Murphy
> Boy Linguist
Peter T. Daniels
>
> "Joseph W. Murphy" <jwmur...@mindspring.com> wrote in message ...
>
> > "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> >
> > >Joseph W. Murphy wrote:
> > >
> > >> Hmmm...so "canus" (gray/grey) appears to have been used pretty widely
> > >> in Latin. But if it is widely used, and isn't a borrowed term, then
> > >> why isn't it regarded as a "basic color term"?
> > >>
> > >> I guess I'm confused as to what is and what isn't included within the
> > >> meaning of "basic color term". Can anyone explain this to me? Sorry
> > >> in advance if I'm appearing obtuse.
> > >
> > >If you don't ask, how will you learn?
> > >
> > >Basic color terms are words that denote only colors and aren't derived
> > >from anything else (hence Javier's tantrums about "orange"; what isn't
> > >clear in English is whether the word denoted the color or the fruit
> > >first, though there's no question of its etymology from a word for the
> > >fruit). Thus the English color words salmon, turquoise, umber, lemon,
> > >etc. aren't basic color terms; the vast majority of color words around
> > >the world are derived color terms.
>
> According to Peter's definition <black> is not a "basic" color term, since
> it is derived (without borrowing) from PGmc *<blakaz> 'burnt', itself
> derived from PIE *<bheleg-> 'to shine, flash, burn', whose other reflexes
> include L. <flagra:re> 'to burn' and Gr. <phlóx> 'flame'. Perhaps it takes a
> thoroughly modern linguist, a real ultra-post-Bloomfieldian, to comprehend
> what a "basic" color term is?
So you never even made it _into_ first-year linguistics? Etymology is
irrelevant to meaning. "Black" has no meaning in English other than
designating a color, and there is no thing designated "black" that isn't
derived from the color name (e.g. bootblack).
> > Thanks for the explanation!. I think I understand now. So my follow
> > up question would be for the Latin scholars here.
> >
> > Is "canus" a "derived" color term? From "canis" (dog-colored?) maybe?
> > Or does it come from the verb "canere" (to be grey or white)?
> > Or is it a "basic" term (i.e., with "canere" being derived from
> > "canus" for example, and not the other way around )?
>
> It is indeed a "basic" term (as far as that means anything). The verb is
> derived from the adjective, whose attested form <ca:nus> is from *<casnos>.
> Related Italic words are Paelignian <casnar> 'old man' and Sabine <cascus>
> 'old' (cited by Varro), showing that the semantic extension 'gray' -> 'gray
> with age, hoary' -> 'old' was not restricted to Latin.
If the sense 'gray' is derived from the sense 'old man, aged', then it's
not basic. Do you also have trouble with ordinary English?
> Comparison of Indo-European cognates gives 'gray' or 'gray-brown' as the
> earliest recoverable sense of PIE */k^as-/. The most common secondary sense
> is 'hare' which appears to have developed independently in several branches
> of IE, judging by the variation in root-extensions.
IE cognates are not relevant to its meaning within Latin.
Or perhaps in your world the "high sea" is intoxicating? "Wine-like" to
designate calmness of surface? Have you never even been out on the open
sea?
The sea out of sight of land was one of the more frightening aspects of
the ancient landscape, and a calm sea was even more frightening -- being
becalmed was a horrible fate. ("Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop
to drink": have you ever stopped to consider the meaning of _that_
familiar out-of-context quotation?)
Peter T. Daniels
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > Basic color terms are words that denote only colors and aren't derived
> > from anything else (hence Javier's tantrums about "orange"; what isn't
> > clear in English is whether the word denoted the color or the fruit
> > first, though there's no question of its etymology from a word for the
> > fruit).
>
> But, doesn't this open a big hole? For major (European) languages, the
> theory pays attention to psychology of native speakers, whereas for
> other languages, field linguists and dictionaries take precedence.
> How do we know that that the latter aren't biased by theory?
By all means, we would welcome speakers of "exotic" languages going into
linguistics; but we do recognize that professions like medicine and even
politics might take precedence.
> And, without etymology, is it easy to tell which came first? For
> example, in Modern Tamil, bleach is often referred to as ``ni:lam''
> which is also the word for blue. The connection is that a major
> brand of bleach is dyed blue. From the recorded history, we know that
> the word ``ni:lam'' is older than bleach [it comes from the word for
> indigo plant, and has shifted meaning from dark blue/blue-black to
> standard blue]. If Tamil were spoken only by a few thousand people
> in a small area without a recorded literature, how would we know which
> came first?
Maybe we wouldn't, but if the word is still the name of the indigo
plant, that would be a pretty good clue.
J. W. Love
[I wrote:]
>kena, from which your 'brown' word comes, most often
>refers to lighter or pale colours, sometimes even white,
>but in some languages again specifically associated with
>hair, which rules it out as a BCT.
Reduplication adds another twist: for <`ena>, Pratt has 'yellowish brown' (with
pl. <`e`ena>) and Milner has 'light brown, fair' (with no special pl.); for
<`ena`ena>, Milner has just plain 'brown' (with plural <`e`ena>), and Pratt has
nothing except the note that it's a redup. of <`ena>. I notice that all the PPN
forms you cite are unreduplicated. Do we have a danger here that instead of
giving reconstructed words, the PPN list is giving reconstructed roots?
>>*There is, however, a bound form, <-usi>, which
>>indicates grue and stands formally in parallel with the
>>suffixes <-mea> 'reddish-brownish', <-tea>
>> 'light-colored', and <-ui> 'dark-colored'.
>Yes *'usi does seem like a good candidate for an
>original 'grue' term, but perhaps only for the darker
>shades. The terms given as equivalents for blue and
>green in modern introductions to Samoan are lanu
>meamata ('colour of unripe things')
Yes, 'unripe-thing color', but that one may be so recent as the 20th century,
for it's not in Pratt 1911. Curiously in view of its seeming literal sense,
Milner restricts its application to nonvegetative things ('of paint, cloth,
etc.') and reserves <lanulau`ava> ('kava-leaf color') to vegetation. Pratt has
the last mentioned term, but only in the English-to-Samoan section, maybe again
indicating extrarecency.
>and lanu moana ('sea colour')
Yes, in all dictionaries.
>or lanu puluu, right? These are pretty clearly recent
> formations.
This one is new to me! neither Pratt nor Milner has it. And what's <pulu`u>? a
misprint for <pula`a> 'wild taro'?
>a couple for red (*mea, *kula)
What happened to SAM <melomelo> 'red' (Pratt, not in Milner)? no PN cognates?
And is SAM <mu:mu:> 'red'---the commonest of these terms nowadays---then a
post-PPN development, from (as Milner believed) <mu:> 'burn, be inflamed'? And
why did Samoan need so many terms for red anyway?!
Larry Trask
[Peter Daniels]
> > >Basic color terms are words that denote only colors and aren't derived
> > >from anything else (hence Javier's tantrums about "orange"; what isn't
> > >clear in English is whether the word denoted the color or the fruit
> > >first, though there's no question of its etymology from a word for the
> > >fruit). Thus the English color words salmon, turquoise, umber, lemon,
> > >etc. aren't basic color terms; the vast majority of color words around
> > >the world are derived color terms.
>
> According to Peter's definition <black> is not a "basic" color term, since
> it is derived (without borrowing) from PGmc *<blakaz> 'burnt', itself
> derived from PIE *<bheleg-> 'to shine, flash, burn', whose other reflexes
> include L. <flagra:re> 'to burn' and Gr. <phlóx> 'flame'. Perhaps it takes a
> thoroughly modern linguist, a real ultra-post-Bloomfieldian, to comprehend
> what a "basic" color term is?
I think there may be a misunderstanding here. So far as I know,
nobody has ever suggested that a basic color term is one with no
etymology at all. After all, every color term has an origin in
something that was originally not a color term, unless you believe
that "Proto-World" color terms have survived to the present day.
Among the criteria commonly advanced for recognizing a color term as
basic is that it should not be derived *synchronically* from another
color term. So, for example, 'red-orange', 'olive green', 'dark
grey', 'pastel blue' and 'reddish' all fail to qualify as basic
because they are transparently derived from other color terms.
I have never before seen it suggested that 'orange' should fail to
qualify as basic because it is derived from the name of the fruit.
The term 'lemon' fails to qualify as basic because speakers agree that
this word denotes a variety of yellow, not because it derives from the
name of the fruit. In contrast, 'orange' does not denote a variety of
another color, and in fact this term passes every test for basic
status that I have ever seen seriously put forward.
As for 'salmon', 'turquoise' and 'umber', these fail to be basic for
much the same reason as 'lemon', and not because of their origin. But
I did once come across a suggestion that 'turquoise', or its rough
equivalent 'aqua', had become a basic color term for some speakers of
English.
On the general issue, I suggest that no one has yet succeeded in
putting forward a set of ironclad criteria for recognizing basic color
terms. It is commonly suggested, for example, that formations like
English 'coffee-colored' and 'wine-colored' cannot be basic because of
their morphological structure. This criterion works pretty well for
English. But does it work universally? What about Turkish
<kahve-rengi> 'brown', which is literally 'coffee-color'? I have seen
several suggestions that this term is basic.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Javier BF
> > blue.
>
> MacLaury has tried to argue that only one of these is basic, but I
> don't find his case convincing. The same distinction has been claimed
> for several other languages, including Italian (<azzurro> and <blu>),
> Modern Greek (<ghalazios> and <ble>), and Turkish (<mavi> and
> <lacivert>).
Isn't <mavi> "plain/bright blue" (pure blue perception)
and <lacivert> "navy, dark blue" (mixed perception of
blue and black), rather than <mavi> "azure, light blue"
(mixed perception of blue and white) and <lacivert>
"plain/bright blue"?
> > Hungarian has two basic terms for red.
>
> MacLaury has argued that one of these, <piros> 'dark red',
The dark one is <vörös>, <piros> is "plain/bright
red". You can use the mnemonics of associating
<piros> with the prefix <pyro> (as in <pyrotechnics>)
since fire is bright red if not orange.
Come to think of it, is Hungarian <piros> in any
way actually related to Greek <pyr> (and/or with
its English cognate <fire>) or is the similarity
purely coincidental?
> is not
> basic, and in this case I find his arguments convincing. The piece of
> the color surface assigned to <piros> by Hungarian-speakers is
> vanishingly small, and MacLaury argues that this non-basic term is
> simply culturally salient because of its association with sinister
> passions.
Or maybe it could be that the obsolescence of
'vörös' as basic colour is due to the influence
of the surrounding languages where a distinction
between two reds is not relevant (or more
generally to the global dominance of Western
culture). The colour semantics of Basque has
also been so altered by the powerful influence
of the surrounding prestige languages that
nowadays it is almost indistinguishable from
the pan-Western 11-colour system.
> And, of course, French famously has two terms for 'brown', <marron>
> and <brun>. There is a significant literature on these terms alone.
> It has been established that regional varieties of French differ
> substantially in the way they use these terms, and a couple of
> linguists have concluded that <marron> is slowly driving <brun> out of
> the language.
:-D It seems "marron" is a powerful word (or
maybe a sexy word? ;-P), capable of displacing
'brun' in French and of entering Spanish as
the nowadays standard word for brown (displacing
native terms like 'pardo' and 'castaño') and
English as a common additional colour.
Cheers,
Javier
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in
<news:3FF56C...@worldnet.att.net> in sci.lang:
> Joseph W. Murphy wrote:
[...]
>> By the way, I found this interesting factoid from a web search on
>> "basic color terms":
>> The opening shot (in the color controversy) was fired by William
>> Gladstone, the British politician and Homeric scholar. He pointed out
>> that abstract color terminology was virtually absent from Homer's
>> work, and claimed that the Greeks had no sense of color at all, having
>> only the ability to distinguish light from dark. He believed "... that
>> the organ of color and its impressions were but partially developed
>> among the Greeks of the heroic age"--i.e., the Greeks were
>> physiologically incapable of perceiving color.
> Shades, or foreshadowings, of Julian Jaynes!
A less extreme version is the claim that since no word for
'color' occurs in Homer, the notion of independent colors --
colors as entities in their own right -- was probably a
later invention. Steve Long, a fellow -- apparently widely
read, but no linguist -- who posted frequently to the old IE
list, is a strong advocate of the view that there were no
independent color words in PIE: 'All such words were
similes, metaphors or by analogy with particular objects,
materials or processes'.
[...]
Brian
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in
<news:3FF447...@worldnet.att.net> in sci.lang:
> Javier BF wrote:
[...]
>> (**) The mix of red with white and yellow is 'salmon',
>> the borderline colour between pink and orange which
>> I'm not sure whether English speakers classify as a
>> variety of 'pink', 'orange' or 'red' (or none, or "it
>> all depends on the amount of white, yellow and red
>> mixing in each particular instance of salmon for that
>> particular instance to be classified as a kind of pink,
>> orange or red"). In Spanish, it is classified as
>> a variety of 'rosa': 'color salmón' = 'color rosa
>> salmón' = 'rosa salmón'.
> The fish salmon is widely available in US markets, and its flesh isn't
> particularly variable in color, so there's a standard reference point
> for the color name. That would seem to be a characteristic of derived
> color names, no?
One reason for that lack of variation is that some of it is
artificially colored. Even so there's a noticeable
difference between the usual farm-raised salmon and king
salmon. (But I'd call all of them 'orange' if I had to pick
a BCT.)
Brian
benlizross
>
> Ross wrote:
> [I wrote:]
>
> >kena, from which your 'brown' word comes, most often
> >refers to lighter or pale colours, sometimes even white,
> >but in some languages again specifically associated with
> >hair, which rules it out as a BCT.
>
> Reduplication adds another twist: for <`ena>, Pratt has 'yellowish brown' (with
> pl. <`e`ena>) and Milner has 'light brown, fair' (with no special pl.); for
> <`ena`ena>, Milner has just plain 'brown' (with plural <`e`ena>), and Pratt has
> nothing except the note that it's a redup. of <`ena>. I notice that all the PPN
> forms you cite are unreduplicated. Do we have a danger here that instead of
> giving reconstructed words, the PPN list is giving reconstructed roots?
Aargh. A whole nother question rears up. Some time within the last month
I was reading a paper by Blust on this very point, that in Polynesian
(Oceanic?) BCT's are typically reduplicated. Maybe somebody can identify
it faster than I can re-locate it. (Jeez, this is supposed to be a
holiday!) Anyhow, I think all the ones I cited do occur in both simple
and redup. forms.
> >>*There is, however, a bound form, <-usi>, which
> >>indicates grue and stands formally in parallel with the
> >>suffixes <-mea> 'reddish-brownish', <-tea>
> >> 'light-colored', and <-ui> 'dark-colored'.
>
> >Yes *'usi does seem like a good candidate for an
> >original 'grue' term, but perhaps only for the darker
> >shades. The terms given as equivalents for blue and
> >green in modern introductions to Samoan are lanu
> >meamata ('colour of unripe things')
>
> Yes, 'unripe-thing color', but that one may be so recent as the 20th century,
> for it's not in Pratt 1911. Curiously in view of its seeming literal sense,
> Milner restricts its application to nonvegetative things ('of paint, cloth,
> etc.') and reserves <lanulau`ava> ('kava-leaf color') to vegetation. Pratt has
> the last mentioned term, but only in the English-to-Samoan section, maybe again
> indicating extrarecency.
>
> >and lanu moana ('sea colour')
>
> Yes, in all dictionaries.
>
> >or lanu puluu, right? These are pretty clearly recent
> > formations.
>
> This one is new to me! neither Pratt nor Milner has it. And what's <pulu`u>? a
> misprint for <pula`a> 'wild taro'?
That was off the top of my head, and may be completely bogus. I thought
I recalled Samoan using puluu < Eng 'blue', but if you say they don't
I'll take your word for it.
While were here, what about lanu 'colour'? It looks cognate with the
word for rinsing in fresh water, and I've long supposed that it derived
from (modern?) techniques of dyeing. Does this seem plausible to you?
>
> >a couple for red (*mea, *kula)
>
> What happened to SAM <melomelo> 'red' (Pratt, not in Milner)? no PN cognates?
*melo is certainly a colour term in PN -- it floats around in the
yellow-orange-red-brown zone -- another of the problems I was talking
about.
> And is SAM <mu:mu:> 'red'---the commonest of these terms nowadays---then a
> post-PPN development, from (as Milner believed) <mu:> 'burn, be inflamed'?
mu:mu: is, I think, unique to Samoan, and Milner's etymology strikes me
as plausible.
And
> why did Samoan need so many terms for red anyway?!
Dunno. I think *mea represents the oldest, in fact in some form like
*ma-iRa I think it goes well back in Austronesian. The only new one I
think I can explain is *kula, which was probably the name of a parrot
species, and came to refer to the highly prized bright red of its
feathers.
Ross Clark
Peter T. Daniels
>
> "Douglas G. Kilday" <fuf...@chorus.net> wrote in message news:<3ff52...@newspeer2.tds.net>...
>
> [Peter Daniels]
>
> > > >Basic color terms are words that denote only colors and aren't derived
> > > >from anything else (hence Javier's tantrums about "orange"; what isn't
> > > >clear in English is whether the word denoted the color or the fruit
> > > >first, though there's no question of its etymology from a word for the
> > > >fruit). Thus the English color words salmon, turquoise, umber, lemon,
> > > >etc. aren't basic color terms; the vast majority of color words around
> > > >the world are derived color terms.
> >
> > According to Peter's definition <black> is not a "basic" color term, since
> > it is derived (without borrowing) from PGmc *<blakaz> 'burnt', itself
> > derived from PIE *<bheleg-> 'to shine, flash, burn', whose other reflexes
> > include L. <flagra:re> 'to burn' and Gr. <phlóx> 'flame'. Perhaps it takes a
> > thoroughly modern linguist, a real ultra-post-Bloomfieldian, to comprehend
> > what a "basic" color term is?
>
> I think there may be a misunderstanding here. So far as I know,
> nobody has ever suggested that a basic color term is one with no
> etymology at all. After all, every color term has an origin in
> something that was originally not a color term, unless you believe
> that "Proto-World" color terms have survived to the present day.
Only in Basque, of course!
> Among the criteria commonly advanced for recognizing a color term as
> basic is that it should not be derived *synchronically* from another
> color term. So, for example, 'red-orange', 'olive green', 'dark
> grey', 'pastel blue' and 'reddish' all fail to qualify as basic
> because they are transparently derived from other color terms.
>
> I have never before seen it suggested that 'orange' should fail to
> qualify as basic because it is derived from the name of the fruit.
> The term 'lemon' fails to qualify as basic because speakers agree that
> this word denotes a variety of yellow, not because it derives from the
> name of the fruit. In contrast, 'orange' does not denote a variety of
> another color, and in fact this term passes every test for basic
> status that I have ever seen seriously put forward.
Today I went to the Met Museum to see the El Grecos (which are leaving
after Sunday), and happily there were lots of other special shows that
were much more interesting. One of them was of Italian manuscript
paintings in the Lehman Collection (14th-century, mostly), so I had a
serendipitous opportunity to check for orange paint. Sho' 'nuff, none!
Except for one piece, the last one in the sequence, which from across
the way I could see had orange in it. And whadya know, it was a late
19th century imitation of early Italian manuscript painting!
There was even a rainbow, an oval around a picture of a Creator God. It
used just three colors of paint, red, yellow, and blue, and five
apparent colored bands were made by streaking red and yellow together
(not mixing them on the palette, but side by side) between the red and
yellow bands, and similarly streaking yellow and blue together. (BTW,
Newton supposedly put "indigo" in the rainbow list because he wanted
there to be seven color names, for mystical reasons.)
> As for 'salmon', 'turquoise' and 'umber', these fail to be basic for
> much the same reason as 'lemon', and not because of their origin. But
> I did once come across a suggestion that 'turquoise', or its rough
> equivalent 'aqua', had become a basic color term for some speakers of
> English.
>
> On the general issue, I suggest that no one has yet succeeded in
> putting forward a set of ironclad criteria for recognizing basic color
> terms. It is commonly suggested, for example, that formations like
> English 'coffee-colored' and 'wine-colored' cannot be basic because of
> their morphological structure. This criterion works pretty well for
> English. But does it work universally? What about Turkish
> <kahve-rengi> 'brown', which is literally 'coffee-color'? I have seen
> several suggestions that this term is basic.
They'd have a lot of 'splainin' to do. (Those are apostrophes, not scare
quotes.)
Peter T. Daniels
(light) red or (dark) pink.
Miguel Carrasquer
>Miguel Carrasquer <m...@wxs.nl> wrote in message news:<nao7vv4bto1gar911...@4ax.com>...
>
>> On 31 Dec 2003 11:19:18 -0800, lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote:
>>
>> >Inherited <negro> is now confined to the sense
>> >'bad, evil' and is no longer a color term, while 'black' is <preto>,
>> >borrowed from Portuguese (by what route Varol doesn't say).
>>
>> If the loss of /j/ after /r/ is normal, there is no need for a Portuguese
>> borrowing. Spa. <prieto> means "black, dark", especially in older sources,
>> and in Latin America.
>
>Miguel, this is very interesting. If I recall correctly what
>Corominas says, he reports that <prieto> got as far as 'dark' in
>Spanish but that it never became an established color term meaning
>'black'.
I only have Corominas' one-volume Breve Dicc. etim. de la Leng. Cast. here
at hand, which is not terribly helpful (APRETAR ... DERIV. ... Prieto
'apretado', 'espeso' (ant. y dial. 'oscuro', 'negro'), 1272, deriv.
regresivo"). The dictionary of the RAE (1970) gives the color term first,
as "Aplícase al color muy obscuro y que casi no se distingue del negro",
María Moliner gives it last: 1) apretado, 2) tacaño, 3) de color muy
obscuro o negro.
A Google search turned up 326,000 mentions of "prieto", all but four of
them (actually, I only checked the first 300) in reference to the surname
Prieto. The other four were links to the great Mexican song "Caballo
prieto azabache"(*), which is one of two personal references I have to the
word "prieto" (the other is a novel by Ramón J. Sender, "Epitalamio del
prieto Trinidad", about a prison rising in the Caribbean).
(*)
Caballo prieto azabache,
como olvidar que te debo la vida
cuando iban a fusilarme
las fuerzas leales de Pancho Villa.
Aquella noche nublada
una avanzada me sorprendió,
y tras de ser desarmado
fui sentenciado al paredón.
Ya cuando estaba en capilla,
le dijo Villa a su asistente,
"me apartas ese caballo
por educado y por obediente"
Sabia que no me escapaba
y solo pensaba en la salvación,
y tú mi prieto azabache
también pensabas igual que yo.
Recuerdo que me dijeron
"pide un deseo pa' ajusticiarte".
Yo quiero ser fusilado
en mi caballo prieto azabache.
Y cuando en ti me montaron
y prepararon la ejecución,
mi voz de mando esperaste
y te avanzaste contra el pelotón.
Con tres balazos de Mauser
corriste azabache salvando mi vida,
lo que tú has hecho conmigo
caballo amigo, no se me olvida.
No pude salvar la tuya
y la amargura me hace llorar,
por eso, mi prieto azabache
no he de olvidarte nunca jamás.
Autor: Pepe Albarrán
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
m...@wxs.nl
Joseph W. Murphy
It IS a great song. It's even better with the music.
I first heard it sung by some Mexican friends on my soccer team.
I've tried translating it for those who don't know Spanish. I hope
I've gotten it right.
Joe Murphy
Jet black horse,
How can I forget the I owe you my life?
When they were going to shoot me
The loyal forces of Pancho Villa
That cloudy night
A scouting party surprised me,
and after being disarmed
I was sentenced to the wall.
When I was blindfolded
Villa told his assistant
Set that horse apart for me
Because he's trained and obedient
I knew that I couldn't escape
And I only thought of salvation
And you, my jet black horse
Were thinking just like me
I remember that they said to me
Ask your wish before we deal with you
I ask to be shot
On my jet black horse
And when they mounted me on you
A they prepared the execution
You awaited my voice of command
And you advanced against the platoon
With three Mauser bullets
You ran, jet black horse, saving my life
And what you did for me
My friend, I will not forget
I couldn't save your life
And the bitterness makes me cry
For that, my jet black horse
I have never forgotten you.
Yusuf B Gursey
> jwmur...@mindspring.com (Joseph W. Murphy) wrote in message news:<3ff236d9...@news.east.earthlink.net>...
>
> The topic here is the work originally published in Brent Berlin and
> Paul Kay, 1969, Basic Color Terms. (A slightly revised edition is now
> in print.)
>
> B & K's work initiated an enormous literature, some of it tending to
> confirm their conclusions, while other work has tended to falsify
> those conclusions.
>
> > Apparently English has 11 basic colors: white, black, red, green,
> > yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey.
> >
> > white < green < purple
> > black < red < yellow <blue <brown < pink
> > < orange
> > < grey
> >
> > If a language has a term to the right of a "<", it will have all of
> > the terms to the left.
> >
> > There are some variations.
>
> There are now quite a few counterexamples known. The most prominent
> defender of B & K's work, the anthropologist Robert MacLaury, has
> dealt with many apparent counterexamples by demonstrating that some
> systems of color terms involve, or are entirely based on, features
> other than hue.
>
> term is a wild card which can be introduced at almost any point.
>
> > Crystal says Latin had no generic terms for "brown" or "grey".
>
> The received view is that Latin had basic color terms only for
> 'black', 'white', 'red', 'yellow', 'green' and 'blue', though it had
> more than one term for some of these. John Lyons argues that one of
> the 'yellow' terms really meant 'brown', but no one seems to agree
> with him.
>
> > Russian, distinguishes between sinii and goluboi -- dark blue and sky
> > blue.
>
> MacLaury has tried to argue that only one of these is basic, but I
> don't find his case convincing. The same distinction has been claimed
> for several other languages, including Italian (<azzurro> and <blu>),
> Modern Greek (<ghalazios> and <ble>), and Turkish (<mavi> and
well, I didn't quite get what is meant by "basic" but in the popular
mind (and polling the family) it is considered a definite color and
people dealinf with literature and dyes and in everday situations (for
example selecting clothes), I would say "yes". but as a physicist (and
there are many in my family with that background) I would have to
admit that teh effect is more produced by a difference in intensity
than wavelength.
>
> > Hungarian has two basic terms for red.
>
> MacLaury has argued that one of these, <piros> 'dark red', is not
> basic, and in this case I find his arguments convincing. The piece of
> the color surface assigned to <piros> by Hungarian-speakers is
> vanishingly small, and MacLaury argues that this non-basic term is
> simply culturally salient because of its association with sinister
> passions.
>
> And, of course, French famously has two terms for 'brown', <marron>
> and <brun>. There is a significant literature on these terms alone.
> It has been established that regional varieties of French differ
> substantially in the way they use these terms, and a couple of
> linguists have concluded that <marron> is slowly driving <brun> out of
> the language.
>
> > How interesting!
>
> Systems of color terms are fascinating. Even if B & K's conclusions
> fail to stand up, the authors deserve our thanks for initiating an
> extraordinarily interesting and fruitful investigation.
>
> Larry Trask
> lar...@sussex.ac.uk
J. W. Love
[I wrote:]
>>Do we have a danger here that instead of giving
>>reconstructed words, the PPN list is giving reconstructed
>>roots?
>Aargh. A whole nother question rears up.
Sorry about that! If it gives you nightmares, a few milligrams of melatonin
half an hour before bedtime should help.
>Some time within the last month I was reading a paper by
>Blust on this very point.
I did not know that. How happy that he'd condescend from his
proto-proto-proto-proto aerie into merely one-proto concerns!
>Anyhow, I think all the ones I cited do occur in both simple
>and redup. forms.
But generally with nuances between them? Cf. SAM <`ena> ‘light brown, fair'
and <`ena`ena> ‘brown'.
>>And what's pulu`u>? a misprint for <pula`a> ‘wild taro'?
>That was off the top of my head, and may be completely
>bogus. I thought I recalled Samoan using puluu < Eng ‘blue',
>but if you say they don't I'll take your word for it.
Ah, OK. I've never heard it, but it's a plausible borrowing.
>While were here, what about lanu ‘colour'? It looks cognate
>with the word for rinsing in fresh water, and I've long
>supposed that it derived from (modern?) techniques of
>dyeing. Does this seem plausible to you?
Possibly, but Milner didn't see a connection, and thought instead that
<fa`alanu> ‘rinse (salt off) in freshwater' might be related to <lano>
‘(freshwater) lake'. (Did you notice his typo in the spelling of the headword
<fa`alanu>?) Do other Polynesians have a rinsing <lanu>? As to the hypothesis
about modern techniques of dyeing, do you have evidence? A poem documented in
the late 19th century and probably dating from long before has <fa`alanu>: <Na
‘ou utuvai e te fa`alanu> ‘Ich holte Wasser, um das Salzwasser abzuspuelen'
(Kraemer 1902:221). The diction is obscure: in the background story, the
rinsing may involve rinsing the mouth out (or cooling the throat down) after
the ingestion of a hot stone), rather than rinsing saltwater off; or it may
invoke the general idea of cooling down the body by sprinking water onto the
skin. The next line goes: <E te le: lilo e te lanu> ‘Und uebergoss mich mit
Kokosschalen', with the footnote "le: lilo le lanu sagt man, wenn spaerlich
Suesswasser vorhanden ist, so dass man das Wasser mit Kokosschalen sich ueber
den Leib giessen muss." Milner missed all this.
>*melo is certainly a colour term in PN -- it floats around
>in the yellow-orange-red-brown zone -- another of the
>problems I was talking about.
Fair enough, but can't we trust that in SAM (the now obsolete) <melomelo> was
some shade of red? Aside from Pratt's listing, Kraemer 1902 or 1903 has a
songtext where something is (I'm translating from memory) ‘melomelo like a
lobster', presumably a cooked one. And then there's Pratt's listing of
<melomelo> as a substantive, glossed "mulieb, pudend." = ‘a woman's external
genital organs' (with Pratt's comma a typo for an abbreviating period). Milner
missed <melomelo> altogether.
You mention "the yellow-orange-red-brown zone." Should we expect to find
semantic drift following a similar series (in either dfirection)? or do changes
leapfrog around the spectrum? Can yellow bypass orange and jump directly to
red? or does change respect the rainbow? Do you detect any correlation between
colorshifts and settlement patterns?
P.S. Give no quarter to recent calumniators. You and Brian and Peter are among
the most reliably informative posters here.
Larry Trask
> > > Hungarian has two basic terms for red.
[LT]
> > MacLaury has argued that one of these, <piros> 'dark red',
> The dark one is <vörös>, <piros> is "plain/bright
> red". You can use the mnemonics of associating
> <piros> with the prefix <pyro> (as in <pyrotechnics>)
> since fire is bright red if not orange.
My apologies for the slip. I should know better than to trust my
leaky memory.
> Come to think of it, is Hungarian <piros> in any
> way actually related to Greek <pyr> (and/or with
> its English cognate <fire>) or is the similarity
> purely coincidental?
Surely a coincidence. Hungarian contains a number of loans from
Latin, but I think few from Greek, and this one looks implausible.
The Hungarian color terms appear to bear no relation to the Finnish
ones. But I've often wondered if Hungarian <kek> 'blue' is borrowed
from Turkic. Anybody know?
> The colour semantics of Basque has
> also been so altered by the powerful influence
> of the surrounding prestige languages that
> nowadays it is almost indistinguishable from
> the pan-Western 11-colour system.
A question while I'm here. Would you regard Basque <laranja> 'orange'
as a basic term? I've always had my doubts about the basic status of
this term.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Yusuf B Gursey
> On the general issue, I suggest that no one has yet succeeded in
> putting forward a set of ironclad criteria for recognizing basic color
> terms. It is commonly suggested, for example, that formations like
> English 'coffee-colored' and 'wine-colored' cannot be basic because of
> their morphological structure. This criterion works pretty well for
> English. But does it work universally? What about Turkish
> <kahve-rengi> 'brown', which is literally 'coffee-color'? I have seen
> several suggestions that this term is basic.
I would quite confidently say this is "basic" in turkish.
the turkic word yag~Iz (in Old Turkic sacred "Brown Earth" - ya*gh*Iz
ye^r - contrasts with sacred "Blue Heaven" - ko":k te*ng*ri ) was
driven out and yag~Iz was resereved for skin tones (and horse colors)
and for "strong" (consequently for people "healhy swarthiness").
somewhat lighter is esmer (arabic 'asmar) only for skin tones and
hair colors (in arabic too 'asmar was driven out by bunniyy
"coffee (bean) (colored)", 'asmar being for skin tones and hair).
in a physics list someone had felt the literal translation of
"Brown Dwarf" (a failed star) as < kahverengi cu"ce > was
cumbersome, but < esmer cu"ce > "swarthy dwarf" (normal for
a human dwarf) was carrying the metaphor too far, and
< yag~Iz cu"ce > implied strength (the "star" is very weak in
terms of energy output, they use - only for a time - energy
inefficient fusion reactions that fizzle out), so
< kahverengi cu"ce > stuck.
>
> Larry Trask
> lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Javier BF
> > also been so altered by the powerful influence
> > of the surrounding prestige languages that
> > nowadays it is almost indistinguishable from
> > the pan-Western 11-colour system.
>
> A question while I'm here. Would you regard Basque <laranja> 'orange'
> as a basic term? I've always had my doubts about the basic status of
> this term.
Since I'm not a native speaker, I don't dare tell with
confidence. But I remember once I was commenting on
colours with a young urban Basque and he was notably
shocked to learn that "gorri" once could be used to
mean also orange. I had to take a dictionary out and
look up some items reflecting the old meaning to have
him convinced. I think when in a few decade's time
the old generation is completely replaced by this
new generation of speakers who have been brought
up in a bilingual environment and under a constant
bombardment of Western cultural models through TV
and cinema, the old colour system will have reached
its endpoint of obsolescence, only remaining as a
fossil in some idiomatic expressions like calling
grey hair "ile urdinak" like in English one still
calls someone a "redhead" whose hair looks orange.
Cheers,
Javier
benlizross
>
> Ross wrote:
> [I wrote:]
>
> >>Do we have a danger here that instead of giving
> >>reconstructed words, the PPN list is giving reconstructed
> >>roots?
> >Aargh. A whole nother question rears up.
>
> Sorry about that! If it gives you nightmares, a few milligrams of melatonin
> half an hour before bedtime should help.
>
> >Some time within the last month I was reading a paper by
> >Blust on this very point.
>
> I did not know that. How happy that he'd condescend from his
> proto-proto-proto-proto aerie into merely one-proto concerns!
Just in case anyone can't wait to read it:
Robert Blust, 'Reduplicated colour terms in Oceanic languages,', in
A.Pawley et al, eds, _The Boy from Bundaberg: Studies in Melanesian
linguistics in honour of Tom Dutton_. Canberra, Pacific Linguistics,
2001, pp.25-49
He sees the CVCV reduplication as originally intensive, but there is a
"drift-like" tendency in Oceanic langs. to use the reduplicated forms
more and more until they lose their semantic markedness. No explanation
as to exactly why this happened, though.
> >Anyhow, I think all the ones I cited do occur in both simple
> >and redup. forms.
>
> But generally with nuances between them? Cf. SAM <`ena> ‘light brown, fair'
> and <`ena`ena> ‘brown'.
Yes, in general there is a difference.
> >>And what's pulu`u>? a misprint for <pula`a> ‘wild taro'?
> >That was off the top of my head, and may be completely
> >bogus. I thought I recalled Samoan using puluu < Eng ‘blue',
> >but if you say they don't I'll take your word for it.
>
> Ah, OK. I've never heard it, but it's a plausible borrowing.
>
> >While were here, what about lanu ‘colour'? It looks cognate
> >with the word for rinsing in fresh water, and I've long
> >supposed that it derived from (modern?) techniques of
> >dyeing. Does this seem plausible to you?
>
> Possibly, but Milner didn't see a connection, and thought instead that
> <fa`alanu> ‘rinse (salt off) in freshwater' might be related to <lano>
> ‘(freshwater) lake'.
Nope. They are separate words at least as far back as PMP, something
like *danum 'water' and *danaw 'lake'. Of course at that level you might
want to look for a morphological link between them, or between *danum
and *inum 'drink'. But that was a long time ago.
(Did you notice his typo in the spelling of the headword
> <fa`alanu>?)
Funny how you can look at something like that and sense that there's
something wrong, but it takes a real effort sometimes to figure out what
it is. A rare OUP typo.
>Do other Polynesians have a rinsing <lanu>?
Yes. As noted above, it seems originally to have been a general word for
water, but comes into PN only as a verb for rinsing or immersing in
fresh water, or as a noun referring to the amniotic fluid.
As to the hypothesis
> about modern techniques of dyeing, do you have evidence?
No, it's just a guess. I assumed it was a local development. /lanu/
'colour' is also found in Tongan and Futunan, but not further afield. I
just looked up Buck's Samoan Material Culture, and he says that while
dyeing is mainly by rubbing or painting, "Dyeing by immersion was
formerly practised." The only concrete example he gives is immersing
something in the black mud of a taro swamp. And he gives no associated
terminology. But I guess it could be a pre-European West PN development.
A poem documented in
> the late 19th century and probably dating from long before has <fa`alanu>: <Na
> ‘ou utuvai e te fa`alanu> ‘Ich holte Wasser, um das Salzwasser abzuspuelen'
> (Kraemer 1902:221). The diction is obscure: in the background story, the
> rinsing may involve rinsing the mouth out (or cooling the throat down) after
> the ingestion of a hot stone), rather than rinsing saltwater off; or it may
> invoke the general idea of cooling down the body by sprinking water onto the
> skin. The next line goes: <E te le: lilo e te lanu> ‘Und uebergoss mich mit
> Kokosschalen', with the footnote "le: lilo le lanu sagt man, wenn spaerlich
> Suesswasser vorhanden ist, so dass man das Wasser mit Kokosschalen sich ueber
> den Leib giessen muss." Milner missed all this.
So le: lilo le lanu would be roughly 'don't waste the rinse-water'?
>
> >*melo is certainly a colour term in PN -- it floats around
> >in the yellow-orange-red-brown zone -- another of the
> >problems I was talking about.
>
> Fair enough, but can't we trust that in SAM (the now obsolete) <melomelo> was
> some shade of red? Aside from Pratt's listing, Kraemer 1902 or 1903 has a
> songtext where something is (I'm translating from memory) ‘melomelo like a
> lobster', presumably a cooked one. And then there's Pratt's listing of
> <melomelo> as a substantive, glossed "mulieb, pudend." = ‘a woman's external
> genital organs' (with Pratt's comma a typo for an abbreviating period). Milner
> missed <melomelo> altogether.
>
> You mention "the yellow-orange-red-brown zone." Should we expect to find
> semantic drift following a similar series (in either dfirection)? or do changes
> leapfrog around the spectrum? Can yellow bypass orange and jump directly to
> red? or does change respect the rainbow? Do you detect any correlation between
> colorshifts and settlement patterns?
Nope. I only wish my thinking had progressed that far. There's at least
one or two published papers on PPN colour terms, and from time to time I
try to interest students in it as a research project. But so far with no
very satisfying results.
> P.S. Give no quarter to recent calumniators. You and Brian and Peter are among
> the most reliably informative posters here.
Why, thank you.
Ross Clark
Douglas G. Kilday
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message ...
What does "derived" mean, Peter? Are you saying that <black> is not "derived
from anything else", i.e., it is an expressive formation unique to Modern
English having no history?
I know you have trouble reading and comprehending _my_ postings. Do you have
the same level of difficulty with your _own_ postings when quoted by
another?
> > > Thanks for the explanation!. I think I understand now. So my follow
> > > up question would be for the Latin scholars here.
> > >
> > > Is "canus" a "derived" color term? From "canis" (dog-colored?) maybe?
> > > Or does it come from the verb "canere" (to be grey or white)?
> > > Or is it a "basic" term (i.e., with "canere" being derived from
> > > "canus" for example, and not the other way around )?
> >
> > It is indeed a "basic" term (as far as that means anything). The verb is
> > derived from the adjective, whose attested form <ca:nus> is from
*<casnos>.
> > Related Italic words are Paelignian <casnar> 'old man' and Sabine
<cascus>
> > 'old' (cited by Varro), showing that the semantic extension 'gray' ->
'gray
> > with age, hoary' -> 'old' was not restricted to Latin.
>
> If the sense 'gray' is derived from the sense 'old man, aged', then it's
> not basic. Do you also have trouble with ordinary English?
Do you also have trouble perceiving the direction of arrows? For those with
general comprehensive disorder, the examples from Paelignian and Sabine
illustrate that the semantic extension ('gray' TO 'old', not 'gray' FROM
old') occurred in other Italic languages and can plausibly be regarded as
pan-Italic, not merely Latin.
> > Comparison of Indo-European cognates gives 'gray' or 'gray-brown' as the
> > earliest recoverable sense of PIE */k^as-/. The most common secondary
sense
> > is 'hare' which appears to have developed independently in several
branches
> > of IE, judging by the variation in root-extensions.
>
> IE cognates are not relevant to its meaning within Latin.
IE cognates are entirely relevant to determining the _primary_ meaning of
the root, 'gray', as opposed to the _derived_ meanings 'old', 'aged', etc.
(unless you are about to pull a Hubey, which wouldn't surprise me at this
point).
Archaic Greeks did not sail out of sight of land. That was a Phoenician
innovation. The term <póntos> 'high sea' should be construed like our
'highway': it was how Greeks got from one locality to another. Its literal
meaning is 'trodden path, way', from PIE */pent-/ 'to tread, go' (but of
course if anyone attempted to educate you, your stock dismissal would be
"etymology is irrelevant to meaning").
The Ancient Mariner (and yes, I _have_ read the entire opium-laced thing)
was becalmed in the Horse Latitudes on the open ocean in a ship unequipped
with oars, a far cry from anything described in Epic Greek poetry or faced
by actual archaic Greek sailors (or even by the Phoenicians commissioned by
Pharaoh Necho to circumnavigate Africa). Using a quotation from Coleridge to
make a point (if there _is_ any point to your rambling) about Homeric
vocabulary is not merely out of context, but outside any reasonable
standards of philology or literary criticism. You might as well cite
"Treasure Island" in attempting to determine the actual route taken by
Menelaus after the Trojan War.
Douglas G. Kilday
"Larry Trask" <lar...@sussex.ac.uk> wrote in message ...
> "Douglas G. Kilday" <fuf...@chorus.net> wrote in message ...
I think "synchronic" or one of its derivatives is missing from Peter's
definition.
> I have never before seen it suggested that 'orange' should fail to
> qualify as basic because it is derived from the name of the fruit.
> The term 'lemon' fails to qualify as basic because speakers agree that
> this word denotes a variety of yellow, not because it derives from the
> name of the fruit. In contrast, 'orange' does not denote a variety of
> another color, and in fact this term passes every test for basic
> status that I have ever seen seriously put forward.
There seems to be considerable variation in the boundary (within perceptual
space) between 'yellow' and 'orange' among different speakers. I have often
heard objects described as 'yellow' which I would call 'orange'. Here in the
Upper Midwest one sees Yellow trucks, and I (as well as my brother) consider
the color used by Yellow Trucking to be orange. I used to know an Italian
who, although fluent in English, had not learned the color-range 'orange' at
all, and used 'yellow' to identify a bright orange book (cf. G. <gelbe Rübe>
'carrot'). Of course, only native-speaker opinions count in such matters.
> As for 'salmon', 'turquoise' and 'umber', these fail to be basic for
> much the same reason as 'lemon', and not because of their origin. But
> I did once come across a suggestion that 'turquoise', or its rough
> equivalent 'aqua', had become a basic color term for some speakers of
> English.
A good case could be made for 'turquoise'. Back in seventh-grade art class
the teacher informed us that we couldn't mix turquoise out of the 'primary'
pigments, and after some futile experimentation I was forced to agree. It
isn't really a 'blue', and it isn't really a 'green'. A similar case could
probably be made for 'teal' with some speakers.
> On the general issue, I suggest that no one has yet succeeded in
> putting forward a set of ironclad criteria for recognizing basic color
> terms. It is commonly suggested, for example, that formations like
> English 'coffee-colored' and 'wine-colored' cannot be basic because of
> their morphological structure. This criterion works pretty well for
> English. But does it work universally? What about Turkish
> <kahve-rengi> 'brown', which is literally 'coffee-color'? I have seen
> several suggestions that this term is basic.
Another problem is that some languages may have multiplets for "basic" color
terms which incorporate other features than hue, such as luster. Latin, for
example, has <a:ter> 'dead black' and <niger> 'shining black'; <albus> 'dead
white' and <candidus> 'shining white'. One could thus argue that Latin lacks
terms corresponding simply to 'black' and 'white'. In creating a set of
"basic" Latin color terms, one might be tempted to throw out <candidus> on
the grounds that it is derived from a stative verb. But then one would have
to throw out <viridis> 'green' on the same grounds, and no objective
criterion can make <a:ter> more "basic" than <niger>, or vice versa. I'm
glad it's not my job to produce or defend a list of "basic" Latin color
terms.
Douglas G. Kilday
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message ...
> Douglas G. Kilday wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > As for the question, the answer is "No". Taupe, for example, is supposed
to
> > be the color of moles. Which species of mole? The adult or juvenile? The
> > under or upper side? The color of the living mole, or of the processed
> > moleskin? Some standard reference point!
>
> You claim that "taupe" is a word for 'mole'?
Yes, from Fr. <taupe>, from L. <talpa>. The unabridged Funk&Wagnalls (1903)
gives _only_ the animal s.v., not the color, which strongly suggests that
the use of the word as a color-term developed in 20th-century English.
> Maybe that explains why, when the minister at my cousin's wedding a few
> years ago came back in to ask someone to move the "taupe" Saturn out of
> her way, neither I with my charcoal Saturn nor my other cousin (Hervé,
> actually) with his dark red Saturn knew which car she meant.
>
> Can _you_ tell which one she meant?
Yes, your Saturn. The moles I have seen are close to the color of charcoal;
one had a purplish cast, but I have never seen a dark red one. (I mean the
talpine, insectivorous, burrowing kind of mole, of course.)
James Dow Allen
>
> I forget now, but languages can be grouped according to how many color
> names they have and if they only have two, for example, it's black and
> white. If they have three, it's black and white and red,...
>
> For some reason it's very regular.
Although Thai has a full range of common
color terms (including "pig's blood",
"cigarette smoke", and "mangosteen shell" just for three shades of
red/brown), it is quite common to approximate colors from a small set
with {black,white,red} indeed being the "big three" and green, in 4th
place, sometimes substituted for blue (for which Thai has two words).
For example, dark brown skin is called black ("see dam") and dark brown
hair is called red (to contrast with black hair). White ("see khao")
is used routinely (and for me confusingly) for transparence
(although Thai does have a word -- "see sai" -- for transparent).
James
Peter T. Daniels
>
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message ...
>
> > Douglas G. Kilday wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > > As for the question, the answer is "No". Taupe, for example, is supposed
> to
> > > be the color of moles. Which species of mole? The adult or juvenile? The
> > > under or upper side? The color of the living mole, or of the processed
> > > moleskin? Some standard reference point!
> >
> > You claim that "taupe" is a word for 'mole'?
>
> Yes, from Fr. <taupe>, from L. <talpa>. The unabridged Funk&Wagnalls (1903)
> gives _only_ the animal s.v., not the color, which strongly suggests that
> the use of the word as a color-term developed in 20th-century English.
11th Collegiate has only the color, 1909; etymology, Fr. "lit. 'mole'."
> > Maybe that explains why, when the minister at my cousin's wedding a few
> > years ago came back in to ask someone to move the "taupe" Saturn out of
> > her way, neither I with my charcoal Saturn nor my other cousin (Hervé,
> > actually) with his dark red Saturn knew which car she meant.
> >
> > Can _you_ tell which one she meant?
>
> Yes, your Saturn. The moles I have seen are close to the color of charcoal;
> one had a purplish cast, but I have never seen a dark red one. (I mean the
> talpine, insectivorous, burrowing kind of mole, of course.)
A womanly command of color fashion terms!
Larry Trask
> Today I went to the Met Museum to see the El Grecos (which are leaving
> after Sunday), and happily there were lots of other special shows that
> were much more interesting. One of them was of Italian manuscript
> paintings in the Lehman Collection (14th-century, mostly), so I had a
> serendipitous opportunity to check for orange paint. Sho' 'nuff, none!
> Except for one piece, the last one in the sequence, which from across
> the way I could see had orange in it. And whadya know, it was a late
> 19th century imitation of early Italian manuscript painting!
I can recommend the book Bright Earth, by Philip Ball, which documents
the developments in pigments and dyes from ancient times to the
present, both in art and in commercial dyeing. It presents a
fascinating story of the struggle to find materials that would provide
a greater range of colors and also retain those colors permanently.
There are some interesting asides on the origins of secondary color
terms, though I recall that the author slips up on a couple of these.
> There was even a rainbow, an oval around a picture of a Creator God. It
> used just three colors of paint, red, yellow, and blue, and five
> apparent colored bands were made by streaking red and yellow together
> (not mixing them on the palette, but side by side) between the red and
> yellow bands, and similarly streaking yellow and blue together. (BTW,
> Newton supposedly put "indigo" in the rainbow list because he wanted
> there to be seven color names, for mystical reasons.)
Yes; that's my understanding. And we've been lumbered with it ever
since.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Larry Trask
[LT]
> > As for 'salmon', 'turquoise' and 'umber', these fail to be basic for
> > much the same reason as 'lemon', and not because of their origin. But
> > I did once come across a suggestion that 'turquoise', or its rough
> > equivalent 'aqua', had become a basic color term for some speakers of
> > English.
> A good case could be made for 'turquoise'. Back in seventh-grade art class
> the teacher informed us that we couldn't mix turquoise out of the 'primary'
> pigments, and after some futile experimentation I was forced to agree. It
> isn't really a 'blue', and it isn't really a 'green'. A similar case could
> probably be made for 'teal' with some speakers.
I suspect that the pigments in use in your art class were not very
primary. They were probably something like red, blue and yellow,
while the primary pigments are cyan, magenta and yellow.
Test bars of cyan, magenta and yellow (and black) are visible along
the edge of a sheet of stamps, and very occasionally in a magazine. I
would be surprised if these pigments could not produce a decent
turquoise.
> Another problem is that some languages may have multiplets for "basic" color
> terms which incorporate other features than hue, such as luster. Latin, for
> example, has <a:ter> 'dead black' and <niger> 'shining black'; <albus> 'dead
> white' and <candidus> 'shining white'. One could thus argue that Latin lacks
> terms corresponding simply to 'black' and 'white'. In creating a set of
> "basic" Latin color terms, one might be tempted to throw out <candidus> on
> the grounds that it is derived from a stative verb. But then one would have
> to throw out <viridis> 'green' on the same grounds, and no objective
> criterion can make <a:ter> more "basic" than <niger>, or vice versa. I'm
> glad it's not my job to produce or defend a list of "basic" Latin color
> terms.
Indeed. But, in spite of the established difference in sense, I have
seen it reported that <a:ter> was much more frequent than <niger> in
Latin texts in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, while from the first
century BC on <niger> became much more frequent. This is consistent
with the observation that <niger> survived almost everywhere in
Romance, while <a:ter> vanished without trace. I would welcome
comments by Latinists on this report.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
J. W. Love
>In spite of the established difference in sense, I have seen it
>reported that <a:ter> was much more frequent than <niger>
>in Latin texts in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, while from the
>first century BC on <niger> became much more frequent.
Possibly (I'm not in a position to know)---but Horace (65-8 B.C.) seems to use
<a:ter> a lot!
>This is consistent with the observation that <niger> survived
>almost everywhere in Romance, while <a:ter> vanished
>without trace. I would welcome comments by Latinists on
>this report.
You might want to soften that "without trace": surely French <atroce>,
<atrocité>, Spanish <atroz>, <atrocidad>, etc., contain at least a "trace" of
<a:ter>: they reflect Latin <a:trox>, formed, according to Lewis & Short, from
<a:ter> in the same way <ferox> (hence 'ferocious') was formed from <ferus>
'wild'.
Brian M. Scott
Dow Allen) wrote in
<news:266426e1.04010...@posting.google.com> in
sci.lang:
[...]
> Although Thai has a full range of common
> color terms (including "pig's blood",
> "cigarette smoke", and "mangosteen shell" just for three shades of
> red/brown),
The second one surprises me: I'd never have thought of
classifying cigarette smoke in the red/brown range.
[...]
Brian
Javier BF
> almost everywhere in Romance, while <a:ter> vanished without trace.
Well, not exactly without trace. It survives in derived
items like <atrocious> (<atroz> in Spanish) and <atrabilious>
(<atrabiliario> in Spanish), from Latin <atro:x> 'frightful,
terrible' (< 'looking dead black') and Latin <a:tra bi:lis>
'black bile' (calque from Greek <melancho:lia:>).
Cheers,
Javier
Douglas G. Kilday
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message ...
> Douglas G. Kilday wrote:
> >
> > "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message ...
> >
> > > Douglas G. Kilday wrote:
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > > As for the question, the answer is "No". Taupe, for example, is
supposed
> > to
> > > > be the color of moles. Which species of mole? The adult or juvenile?
The
> > > > under or upper side? The color of the living mole, or of the
processed
> > > > moleskin? Some standard reference point!
> > >
> > > You claim that "taupe" is a word for 'mole'?
> >
> > Yes, from Fr. <taupe>, from L. <talpa>. The unabridged Funk&Wagnalls
(1903)
> > gives _only_ the animal s.v., not the color, which strongly suggests
that
> > the use of the word as a color-term developed in 20th-century English.
>
> 11th Collegiate has only the color, 1909; etymology, Fr. "lit. 'mole'."
Well, that's interesting. I don't have access to the OED. One would
certainly expect an overlap in dates between the senses 'mole' and
'mole-colored'.
> > > Maybe that explains why, when the minister at my cousin's wedding a
few
> > > years ago came back in to ask someone to move the "taupe" Saturn out
of
> > > her way, neither I with my charcoal Saturn nor my other cousin (Hervé,
> > > actually) with his dark red Saturn knew which car she meant.
> > >
> > > Can _you_ tell which one she meant?
> >
> > Yes, your Saturn. The moles I have seen are close to the color of
charcoal;
> > one had a purplish cast, but I have never seen a dark red one. (I mean
the
> > talpine, insectivorous, burrowing kind of mole, of course.)
>
> A womanly command of color fashion terms!
Yeah, that ought to come in handy in case my girlfriend moves out and I have
to resort to bar-hopping again: some women really dig vocabulary!
It also illustrates the practical application of etymology to everyday life.
Douglas G. Kilday
"Brian M. Scott" <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote in message ...
> On 4 Jan 2004 04:36:19 -0800 jdall...@yahoo.com (James
> Dow Allen) wrote in
> sci.lang:
>
> [...]
>
> > Although Thai has a full range of common
> > color terms (including "pig's blood",
> > "cigarette smoke", and "mangosteen shell" just for three shades of
> > red/brown),
>
> The second one surprises me: I'd never have thought of
> classifying cigarette smoke in the red/brown range.
Cobwebs in the houses of heavy smokers acquire a striking deep reddish-brown
hue and a sub-metallic luster reminiscent of heavily tarnished copper.
Accumulations of smokers' gunk as small spots on interior windowpanes have a
similar hue but flat luster. I know nothing about Thai, but one possible
explanation of the fact cited is that the culture regards such
concentrations as exhibiting the "real" color of cigarette smoke, as
Japanese culture regards the "real" color of the sun to be red or
reddish-orange.
Peter T. Daniels
>
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message ...
>
> > Douglas G. Kilday wrote:
> > >
> > > "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message ...
> > >
> > > > Douglas G. Kilday wrote:
> > > >
> > > > [...]
> > > >
> > > > > As for the question, the answer is "No". Taupe, for example, is
> supposed
> > > to
> > > > > be the color of moles. Which species of mole? The adult or juvenile?
> The
> > > > > under or upper side? The color of the living mole, or of the
> processed
> > > > > moleskin? Some standard reference point!
> > > >
> > > > You claim that "taupe" is a word for 'mole'?
> > >
> > > Yes, from Fr. <taupe>, from L. <talpa>. The unabridged Funk&Wagnalls
> (1903)
> > > gives _only_ the animal s.v., not the color, which strongly suggests
> that
> > > the use of the word as a color-term developed in 20th-century English.
> >
> > 11th Collegiate has only the color, 1909; etymology, Fr. "lit. 'mole'."
>
> Well, that's interesting. I don't have access to the OED. One would
> certainly expect an overlap in dates between the senses 'mole' and
> 'mole-colored'.
"Taupe" does not mean 'mole' in English.
J. W. Love
>/lanu/ 'colour' is also found in Tongan and Futunan, but not
>further afield. I just looked up Buck's Samoan Material
>Culture, and he says that while dyeing is mainly by rubbing
>or painting, "Dyeing by immersion was formerly practised."
Your wanted word here is not <lanu>, but <fui> 'steep in water'.
>The only concrete example he gives is immersing
>something in the black mud of a taro swamp. And he gives
>no associated terminology.
I think Krämer tells more about this. Also, from Pratt 1911:154:
<fui`ele> 'redden with red earth[,] as shaggy mats'
<fuinonu> 'dye red'
<fuipani> 'blacken with the _pani_'
Hence <fuipani> 'black cloth'. You see that <fui> is followed by the name of
the substance that imparts the color to the water. Too bad neither Pratt nor
Milner identified the <pani> tree. Any help from other PN languages?
Naturally, Milner missed all this. He had such bad luck with traditional terms!
The girl in a famous story documented by Penisimane in the 1860s wears a
<fuipani>; in a version I recorded in the early 1970s, the garment has become
an <`ie tu`utu`u-mumutu> '(fancy) cutaway cloth'; in your colleague Richard's
version, recorded about the same time, it's merely an <`ie lavalava> 'wearable
cloth'. Time marches on!
James Dow Allen
> > > color terms (including "pig's blood",
> > > "cigarette smoke", and "mangosteen shell" just for three shades of
> > > red/brown),
> >
> > The second one surprises me: I'd never have thought of
> > classifying cigarette smoke in the red/brown range.
>
> Cobwebs in the houses of heavy smokers acquire a striking deep reddish-brown
> hue and a sub-metallic luster reminiscent of heavily tarnished copper.
Since I started this, I'd better post a retraction. My main point was that
Thai language often substitutes simple colors (red, black, white) for
other colors (e.g. brown) even though there are other color names.
The three I mentioned ("pig's blood" etc.) are not exotic names one
might see in a paint store, but color words one hears every day in rural
Thailand. It may be interesting that the three weird color names most
often heard all refer to shades of brown or reddish brown.
And that's all I meant by "red/brown" -- red or brown.
Sorry for the confusion.
James
(No mail to the From address, please, -- it's just a spam trap.)
Douglas G. Kilday
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message ...
> Douglas G. Kilday wrote:
> >
> > "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message ...
> >
> > > Douglas G. Kilday wrote:
> > > >
> > > > "Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message ...
> > > > >
> > > > > [...]
> > > > >
> > > > > You claim that "taupe" is a word for 'mole'?
> > > >
> > > > Yes, from Fr. <taupe>, from L. <talpa>. The unabridged Funk&Wagnalls
> > (1903)
> > > > gives _only_ the animal s.v., not the color, which strongly suggests
> > that
> > > > the use of the word as a color-term developed in 20th-century
English.
> > >
> > > 11th Collegiate has only the color, 1909; etymology, Fr. "lit.
'mole'."
> >
> > Well, that's interesting. I don't have access to the OED. One would
> > certainly expect an overlap in dates between the senses 'mole' and
> > 'mole-colored'.
>
> "Taupe" does not mean 'mole' in English.
As mentioned, the 1903 F&W gives 'a mole' as the _only_ sense of <taupe>,
for which an obsolete variant <talpe> is cited. Following this is <taupie>
(Scot. dial., var. <tawpie>) 'a foolish, thoughtless young woman', with no
etymology given (and I have no idea).
Brian M. Scott
<fuf...@chorus.net> wrote in
<news:3ffd1110$1...@newspeer2.tds.net> in sci.lang:
[...]
> Following this is <taupie>
> (Scot. dial., var. <tawpie>) 'a foolish, thoughtless young woman', with no
> etymology given (and I have no idea).
OED suggests a Scand. origin, noting Norw. <tåp> 'a
half-wit, esp. a woman', Dan. <taabe> 'a fool', Sw. <tåpig>
'foolish, weak-minded'.
Brian
Torsten Poulin
> OED suggests a Scand. origin, noting Norw. <tåp> 'a half-wit,
> esp. a woman', Dan. <taabe> 'a fool', Sw. <tåpig> 'foolish,
> weak-minded'.
That's a peculiar, or at least quite old, Danish form the OED
has chosen to quote. Before the reform in 1948, it was <Taabe>.
Afterwards, it's <tåbe>.
Anyway, Dansk Ordbog for Folket (1907) writes, "ældre dansk
<taabe>, aandsvag Person; norsk Landsmaal <taap(e)>; jævnfør
oldnordisk <tæpr>, ræd for at kommet noget for nær; Ordets
oprindelige Betydning synes at være: famlende Person".
Do you know anything about the etymology of ON <tæpr>?
--
Torsten
Brian M. Scott
<t_usen...@hotmail.com> wrote in
<news:btjl5c$7un7m$1...@ID-89913.news.uni-berlin.de> in
sci.lang:
> Brian M. Scott wrote:
>> OED suggests a Scand. origin, noting Norw. <tåp> 'a half-wit,
>> esp. a woman', Dan. <taabe> 'a fool', Sw. <tåpig> 'foolish,
>> weak-minded'.
> That's a peculiar, or at least quite old, Danish form the OED
> has chosen to quote. Before the reform in 1948, it was <Taabe>.
> Afterwards, it's <tåbe>.
The original OED was completed in 1928, I believe, so it's
not surprising.
> Anyway, Dansk Ordbog for Folket (1907) writes, "ældre dansk
> <taabe>, aandsvag Person; norsk Landsmaal <taap(e)>; jævnfør
> oldnordisk <tæpr>, ræd for at kommet noget for nær; Ordets
> oprindelige Betydning synes at være: famlende Person".
> Do you know anything about the etymology of ON <tæpr>?
De Vries seems to think that it's related to MLG <ta:pen>
'leicht berühren' and OFris <tappia> 'zupfen', but even he
doesn't go any further than that.
Brian
Torsten Poulin
> Torsten Poulin wrote:
>> That's a peculiar, or at least quite old, Danish form the OED
>> has chosen to quote. Before the reform in 1948, it was <Taabe>.
>> Afterwards, it's <tåbe>.
> The original OED was completed in 1928, I believe, so it's
> not surprising.
It ought to have been capitalized. The rule stating that nouns
should be capitalized was first formulated in Peder Schulz,
"Danskens Skriverigtighed" (1724), but the practice was common
long before that. Does the OED quote German nouns in lowercase?
>> Do you know anything about the etymology of ON <tæpr>?
> De Vries seems to think that it's related to MLG <ta:pen>
> 'leicht berühren' and OFris <tappia> 'zupfen', but even he
> doesn't go any further than that.
Thanks.
--
Torsten
Brian M. Scott
<t_usen...@hotmail.com> wrote in
<news:btkqi9$8hpdo$1...@ID-89913.news.uni-berlin.de> in
sci.lang:
[...]
> Does the OED quote German nouns in lowercase?
Yes.
[...]
Brian