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

Ray Brown wrote:

> 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.

Well, I meant that I didn't believe it was neccesary to exclude
borrowings, because basic colour-ness can change with time.

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