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

On Thursday, April 22, 2004, at 07:10 AM, Joe wrote:

> Adam Walker wrote:
>
>> --- 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"),
Agreed - the first is French and the second takes its name from the site
of one of Napoleon's bloodier battles.

>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>
> I don't believe that.  It menas that, historically, it wasn't a basic
> colour term, but it is now.
True of orange, I have no doubt. There are AFAIK no standard Middle
English or Old English names that correspond to the color name 'orange';
the name is taken from the name of the fruit whose name is certainly of
Arabic origin. I wasn't aware that the Arabs got the name from Persian,
but maybe they did.

But IMO you do well to question 'purple'. How ancient does the borrowing
have to be before we consider the name to be 'primitive'? If we include
_all_ borrowings we'd be left with _very few_ basic colors. I believe only
'red' and 'yellow' can be shown to be inherited from PIE - other are
borrowings or innovations over the ages.

Yep - 'purple' is ultimately derived from the Greek word for a type of
shellfish from which the ancient obtained a crimson dye. But it ain't a
*direct* borrowing! The word is, in fact, attested in _Old English_ (i.e.
pre-Norman). It got into the Germanic dialects from Vulgar Latin on
frontier stations and this was a few centuries after the Romans got the
term from the Greeks. In other words, it's always been an _English_ word.
Also, unlike orange, the medieval heralds had a word for it: 'purpure'
(that, like other heraldic terms, is taken from Old French).

Indeed, I'd have thought the old heraldic terms give a fairly good
indication of what our English forebears considered basic:
argent = white
sable = black
gules = red
or = yellow
vert = green
azure = blue
purpure = purple (i.e. purpure from Old French, 'purple' from Old English)

The borrowing argument needs to be used with care IMO. Consider that
"albus", Latin word for 'white', does not survive as an adjective in any
of the Romancelangs (only as a fem. noun meaning 'dawn', cf. It. l'alba,
Fr. l'aube). The western Romancelangs all borrowed the Germanic blank- (cf.
  English 'blank'). Does this mean that white is not a basic color among
Romance speakers? The French also borrowed 'bleu' from Germanic . So blue
is not a basic color among the French?

Indeed, as I said, AFAIK only 'red' & 'yellow' are the only color names
inherited from PIE. Others have been innovations or borrowings over the
centuries. It seems to me in any case that a culture's perception of what
are 'basic colors' changes over time as do most other things; e.g. I'm
fairly certain that my medieval forebears would not have considered
'orange' to be basic, but most people probably would do today.

BTW, I expected that in French heraldry green would be 'vert' as in
English heraldry. In fact, it ain't - for French heralds it's 'sinople'.
What is it with heralds and the color green?  ;)

Ray
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