Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Blue grass and skies

From:DOUGLAS KOLLER <laokou@...>
Date:Thursday, August 10, 2000, 5:27
From: "Yoon Ha Lee"

> Korean does that too. Paransaek (I *think* that's the right > transliteration) is blue or green; choroksaek is exclusively green. > There's no word for just blue unless my mom missed it. <wry g>
Not speaking Korean, my guess would be that "-saek" corresonds to Chinese "se4", "color" (Cantonese offers "sik1", which gets us closer to the Korean [Japanese "seki"]). "lan2" gets us to "paRAN" (Japanese: "ran")(though it could be an indigenous word and a coincidence), and "lü4" (Cantonese "luk6") gets us to "choROK" (Japanese: "ryoku" or "roku") (ditto) ("cho", maybe "grass"?). I suspect there's a word out there for "qing1", but I don't know enough about Korean phonetics to start making educated guesses about what it could be. Kou