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

Michael Poxon wrote:
> Maybe one test for basicness could be whether or not the term can
> intuitively include more specific colour terms which are
> not themselves seen by the speakers as basic terms. So English "red"
> includes scarlet, vermilion, etc., whilst these terms cannot be similarly
> manipulated any farther. So in English, red is basic while scarlet etc., is
> not. Beige, taupe and their ilk are also non-basic terms by the same token,
> being
> submembers of brown or yellow.
By this standard I guess "silki" (turquoise) in Lindiga would be a
candidate for being a basic color, since "ngagki" (teal) and "sajéni"
(cyan) could be considered as varieties of "silki". Actually in the
dictionary I have "ngagki" listed as a variety of "lampi" (blue), but I
think it might make more sense to make it a variety of "silki".

On the other hand, orange is listed as being a variety of red, and there
aren't any colors listed as being varieties of orange, so orange isn't a
basic Lindiga color!

Could there be a language in which "purple" is considered a kind of
"blue" (along with "azure" and others), while "violet" is a specific
kind of "purple"?

  The same with turquiose. It doesn't matter
> whether you feel it's a greenish-blue or bluish-green: the fact is, it's a
> submember of a term farther up the hierarchy.
> The comments on "gold" are interesting. Surely no natlang perceives colour
> differences as wavelengths. I'd say that colours are seen
> as qualities rather than as quantities. I don't see any reason why gold and
> silver shouldn't be basic terms, though I know of no natlang that has them.
> Similarly, orange may well be red + yellow in scientific or artistic terms,
> but no natlang is going to see it that way.
> Mike
Gold and silver in Lindiga are just varieties of yellow and gray.