Re: Blue grass and skies

From: "Yoon Ha Lee"

> Wow.
I'm only making educated guesses here. Lots of these look like they are
probably indigenous Korean terms, and you're on your own there.

> Let's see:
> pparkang: red
> dahong: red-orange
> juhang: orange
These three are indigenous? "hong2" is red in Mandarin and often plays into
descriptions of "orange". Don't know how it would make its way into Korean.
"Ju2hong2" is one way to say "tangerine orange" but it really is the deep
orange of a mandarin tangerine -- low on the yellow. Don't know how it would
make its way into Korean (-kang, -hong, -hang seem reasonable).

> kyursaek: light orange (literally "tangerine-colored")
Again, "-saek" is "color"; Cantonese "gwat1" or Taiwanese "gut4" or "giat4",
"tangerine", could feasably get you to "kyur", but there may be other
options.

> norang: yellow
> yeondu: pale green
Indigenous terms?

> noksaek: green
I think "luk6sik1", "green color" works here.

> chungrok: blue-green?
Ah! Perhaps "qing1" to "chung"? (Seemed in the hoary past I ran into another
Chinese "-ing" going to a Korean "-ung", though I don't remember the
specific example.) We just said Chinese "luk6" goes to Korean "nok", but the
"n, l, r" series is tricky in the Orient, so maybe "-rok" is an allophone in
Korean?

> parang: blue or green
> namsaek: exclusively blue (something-colored, but I don't recognize "nam"
>   because I *thought* nam by itself meant "south," maybe got contracted?)
Again, "l" and "n" mix and match frequently. So "blue" (lan2, Canto: laam4)
and "south" nan2, Canto: naam4) are homonyms in a whole bunch o' dialects.
Namsaek <= lan2se4, "blue color"

> borah: purple
Indigenous?

> jaju: plum
Indigenous?

> hwaesaek: grey
"hui1" means "ashes"; "hui1se4" means "gray"; not a big stretch, no matter
what dialect one's using.

> hayang: white
Indigenous? Chinese is "bai2" or "baak6". Japanese-Chinese gets you "hyaku",
hard to make the reach without further input.

> kkamang: black
Indigenous?

> keum: gold (colored)
Mandarin: jin1, but Cantonese: gam1 and Taiwanese: gim1; no biggie here.

> About the *only* thing I can vaguely remember is *maybe* people of
> African descent being referred to as "buraeku," and *usually* they're
> referred to as "kkamang saram" (Korean for "black person").
Again, I'm guessing, but perhaps "buraeku" corresponds to Japanese "buraku",
as in "burakumin", "the untamed tribal people". Though genetically identical
to other Japanese in every way, "burakumin" hail back to a former caste of
working-class people like tanners and butchers, and are considered
sub-standard, less-than, or non-Japanese. You *don't* want to marry someone
with even a drop of burakumin blood in their ancestry, and if you are
burakumin, great pains are taken to conceal the fact so that you're
maritally eligible. It's a major taboo topic in national discourse, and no
Japanese high school history textbook (as with the Japanese Occupation) will
touch it with a barge pole, but the Japanese treat Koreans and even
ethnically Korean Japanese (ie. born in Japan with Korean ancestry) with
similar legal contempt (though laws were thinking about changing when I
left), so perhaps Koreans have a similar underclass. That blacks would be
thrown in with other untouchables in the Orient would not really surprise
me -- *low* man on the totem pole.

Kou