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Color morphemes

From:Pavel Adamek <pavel.adamek@...>
Date:Wednesday, August 28, 2002, 16:29
> - pink/magenta > - RED > - orange > - brown/tan > - YELLOW > - green > - cyan/azure > - BLUE/INDIGO > - purple/violet
I think that "pink" means "pale red". "Brown" is "dark yellow, orange or red". We could consider some color names used in computer languages: Standard CGA colors: (defined for example in Borland C) R G B BLACK 0 0 0 BLUE 0 0 2/3 GREEN 0 2/3 0 CYAN 2/3 2/3 0 RED 2/3 0 0 MAGENTA 2/3 0 2/3 BROWN 2/3 1/3 0 LIGHTGRAY 2/3 2/3 2/3 DARKGRAY 1/3 1/3 1/3 LIGHTBLUE 1/3 1/3 1 LIGHTGREEN 1/3 1 1/3 LIGHTCYAN 1/3 1 1 LIGHTRED 1 1/3 1/3 LIGHTMAGENTA 1 1/3 1 YELLOW 1 1 1/3 WHITE 1 1 1 Windows colors: (defined for example in HTML 4.0 Specification and in Cascading Style Sheets Specification) R G B Black 0 0 0 Navy 0 0 1/2 Green 0 1/2 0 Teal 0 1/2 1/2 Maroon 1/2 0 0 Purple 1/2 0 1/2 Olive 1/2 1/2 0 Gray 1/2 1/2 1/2 Silver 3/4 3/4 3/4 Blue 0 0 1 Lime 0 1 0 Aqua 0 1 1 Red 1 0 0 Fuchsia 1 0 1 Yellow 1 1 0 White 1 1 1 The 6 basic hues are generally named Blue, Cyan, Green, Yellow, Red, Magenta. It would be usefull to have names for 12 hues, but I think that only 2 names of remaining 6 "tertiary colors" are used at large: Violet and Orange. Some suggestions for remaining names? Maybe "scarlet" for "magentish red" and "periwinkle" for "cyanish green"?
> We'd also need further morphemes (some of which wouldn't > be grouped specifically with colours because they will > have other usages), e.g.: > > - "colour" (in general) > - "dark" > - "light" > - "-ish" ("similar to") > - "anti-" (for complementary colours)
Colour is 3-dimensional, so there should be also morphemes for its components: "hue", "saturation" and "intensity". I think that 2 words for levels of saturation ("pale" and "deep") and 2 words for levels of intensity ("dark" and "light") will suffice. Higher precision can be obtained by using general-purpose morphemes like "very" and "slightly".
> About "dark" ("blackish") and "light" ("whitish"), we could > also add three more morphemes, with the equivalent broad > senses of "reddish", "yellowish" and "bluish"
These are rather compound or derived words than basic morphemes. P.

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Herman Miller <hmiller@...>