Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ    Attic   

Re: Semantic typology?

From:Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
Date:Monday, August 11, 2008, 13:44
On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 9:05 AM, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
>>Is there any linguistic theory dealing with language typology on a semantic >>level, corresponding to the morphosyntactic typologies based on primary
> I've seen some that concern fairly closed word classes, especially colors: the > most basic division is "white" vs. "black" (some binary systems I've seen > described as "bright" vs "dull"), after that comes the concept of "red", after > that "green" and "yellow", then "blue", then various other colors. As usual, > there are exceptions - IIRC there was a language that failed to > distinguish "blue", but did have words for "purple" and "brown".
Now that you mention it I remember heard about some such studies a while ago. gzb might already violate said conditional universal; its root terms are for white, red, blue and green (the light-primaries rather than the pigment-primaries). Black and secondary colors are derived with opposite-derivation from the basic terms, and other terms can be derived from any word for a physical thing with the suffix -kwa "color of"; potato > light brown and chocolate
> dark brown are the most common uses of that suffix, I think.
But for very light-brown/yellow I tend to use the basic term for "red" rather than the "red + green" compound.
> Compass directions, maybe? I would assume any language distinguishing roots > for any of the intercardinals should also distinguish some for the cardinals.
That's a sensible hypothesis. Do you know of any languages that have roots for the intercardinals rather than deriving them from cardinals?
> I'm rather skeptical about the existence of semantic universals linking non- > related concepts.
So would I be. I was thinking along the lines of the color theory you mentioned, like "if a lang distinguishes brown from orange it will also distinguish blue from green" or, re kinship maybe, "if a lang has separate roots for male and female cousins it will also have such for male and female siblings".
>>If there are such hypothesized universals I want to violate some of them >>in my next engelang and see what happens.
> Basic color terminology of "polka", "tweed", "chrome", "iridescent" > and "matte"? :)
Good for a Dadalang! And its basic kinship terms would be "male first cousin", "female first cousin once removed", "great aunt on the father's side" and "father-in-law"; complex affixation would derive "father", "mother", "son", "daughter" etc. from those. The basic directional roots would all be 22.5 degrees clockwise off from the cardinals. -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before I analyze the results and write the article

Replies

Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...>