Re: Quest for colours: what's basic then?

--- Levi Tooker <lrtooker@...> wrote:
> From what I remember, the criteria for the studies
> done on color universals
> excluded as basic color terms all loan words
> ("beige", "magenta"),
This is what I remember from a semantics class.  Which
would, of course, exclude orange and purple too.
Orange is ultimately from Persian and purple is from
Greek.

> morphologically complex words ("burnt umber",
> "off-white"), and words which
> are obviously derived from other lexical items
> ("gold", "violet"...although
> "orange" seems to have been counted as a basic color
> term).
Which, would exclude the German türqis and the English
aqua both of which are also borrowed.

They may refer
> to colors which don't easily fit into the
> definitions of the basic color
> terms, but they are obviously subordinate forms.
> Perhaps frequency of use
> is (or ought to be) factored in as well. "Brown",
> "purple" and "blue" are
> used to refer to beige, magenta and cyan things more
> often than the words
> "beige", "magenta" and "cyan" are.
Personally, I *think* in terms of the following colors
- black, white, grey, red, green, blue, yellow,
orange, purple, pink, beige, aqua and brown.

I do not think of beige as being brown any more than I
think of pink as being red or grey as being black.  I
also do not accept aqua as being categorizable as
either blue or green.

Another few colors I'm not really comforable with
saying "do not belong within another color", but I'm
not really sure where to class them are magenta (is it
red or is it purple), cream (is it yellow or white?),
khaki (beige or brown? or green?), chartreuse (yellow
or green?).  If I took longer, I'd probably come up
with more of these I'm-not-sure-where-to-put-'em
colors.

Oh, and another limitation on being considered a
"basic" color was that the word must not be restricted
to a very small number of referents.  That's why blond
was excluded from the English list since it only
refers to hair and wood.

Adam


=====
Indjindrud edjuebu ul Azor ad ul Sadoc. Indjindrud edjuebu ul Sadoc ad ul Acim.
Indjindrud edjuebu ul Acim ad ul Eliud. Indjindrud edjuebu ul Eliud ad ul
Eleazar. Indjindrud edjuebu ul Eleazar ad ul Matan. Indjindrud ul Matan ad ul
Jagovu. Indjindrud edjuebu ul Jagovu ad ul Jozevu ul maridu djal Maja dji fin
ninadud ul Jezu fin nicuamad Cristu.

Machu 1:14-16

Replies