Re: Blue grass and skies

On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:

> 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>
>
> Chinese has "qing1" which describes the color of mountains in the distance
> but also covers a range of tourquoise to teal. "Lan2" is blue; unqualified,
> I tend to think of sky-blue, cerulean at first utterance, but given foreign
> context, royal blue falls under the same category (ie. no yellow). "Lü4"
> points to emerald-colored-to-Kelly-green. Traditional literature says the
> Japanese can't distinguish between blue and green. "Ao" grafts to the
> character "qing1" and Japanese drivers say that a green traffic light is
> "ao" (whereas a Chinese would say it's "lü4"). But Japanese has "midori",
> which is more "Kelly-green". We also should not forget that Japanese allows
> for colors such as "buruu", "guri~n", and "reddo", calquing for the Western
> spectrum. I would imagine Korean plays a similar game.
>
> Kou
Wow.

Let's see:
pparkang: red
dahong: red-orange
juhang: orange
kyursaek: light orange (literally "tangerine-colored")
norang: yellow
yeondu: pale green
noksaek: green
chungrok: blue-green?
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?)
borah: purple
jaju: plum
hwaesaek: grey
hayang: white
kkamang: black

keum: gold (colored)
I learned silver and copper at some point, but don't remember them.

Some of the terms seem to be taken from fruit or flowers, and I can't
vouch for the etymology or anything; I took this from a coloring pencil
book in Korean that my mom sent me.  Next time I'll keep my mouth
shut...my Korean is embarrassingly bad!

I haven't actually heard Koreanized terms from English used in Korea, and
my mother's family does textile merchanting and sewing, so color does
come up fairly often.  I suspect the vocabulary, like everything else, is
stolen from Chinese, but there *does* seem to be fairly rich terminology
for varied shades of colors.  I'll ask my mom sometime.  :-/

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").

Take all this with a grain of salt.  Korean was my first language but I
lost it all when we moved back to the U.S.

YHL