Re: NATLANG: Colours

There are 40 pages about "The Meaning of Colour Terms"
in Wierzbicka, "Semantics - Primes and Universals".
About Russian, she mentions "salatovyj" (light green)
against "zelenij" (green), and "bezhovyj" (beige)
against "koricznievyj" (brown). She also mentions
Japanese "aoi" ("Thus, it is not only the sky which is
called 'aoi', but also wet grass and the "Go!" traffic
lights").

About traffic lights, I wondered yesterday when seeing
at the same time, in the city, two different
"Pedestrian: Go" signs, on two successive crossroads:
the first one was clearly yellow-green, and the secund
one blue-green. Probably two different manufacturers.
Looking at those signs at once, I thougt "this is not
the same colour", an also "I like that blue-green, but
this yellow-green looks really ugly". Of course I
supposed that in both cases, they should be understood
as "green" signs, for cultural reasons, and also
because the signs showed a pedestrian actually
walking, not staying. So I crossed over in both cases
(and wasn't killed). But there seems not to be any
standard green for traffic lights.

I think the reason for which there are different words
for "dark blue" and "light blue" in some languages
clearly refer to human experience, in that case, the
color of the sky, in the day # at dawn for ex. In
French we say "bleu ciel" against "bleu sombre", or
"bleu marine", for ex, which is less differenciated
than in Russian. We also say "azur" for light blue,
but that's more a poetical terminology, unlike in
Spanish, were "azul" is standard. I'm not sure it's
the same distinction as between "red" and "pink",
where "red" seems to me the main concept, "pink" a
secundary one (which would be the main concept between
"light blue" and "dark blue" ? Hard to say).

--- John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:
> Ray Brown scripsit:
>
> > But this has nothing to do with the so-called
> 'universals' of
> > color-naming.
> >  I don't recall them off-hand but I seem to
> remember they're along the
> > lines of: if a language has only two color-words,
> it will distinguish this
> > group & that group; if it has three it will
> distinguish X, Y, X; if it has
> > 4, it will distinguish W, X, Y, z..etc.
>
> Exactly.  And rather than asking "Where are the
> boundaries of X", we ask
> "Which of these samples is the best example of X?"
> When we do that,
> we find that:
>
> 	languages with 2 basic color words have "white" and
> "black";
> 	languages with 3 basic color words have also "red";
> 	languages with 4 basic color words have also either
> "green" or "yellow"
> 	languages with 5 basic color terms have both
> "green" and "yellow"
> 	languages with 6 basic color terms have also "blue"
> 	languages with 7 basic color terms have also
> "brown"
>
> When I say that a language has a word for "white", I
> mean that the
> best example of the color named by that term is
> white.
> This is much more reliable than judgments about
> color boundaries, which
> vary between individuals.
>
> The major deviation from these rules is that some
> languages don't
> discriminate between blue and green.  Russian has
> two words for "blue"
> (corresponding psychologically to the English
> distinction between
> "red" and "pink").

=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


	
		
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