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

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. 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
> Hmm, 'gold' is really a surface property affecting the kind
> of reflection but not the wavelength, so that is no color.
>
> German 'Türkis' is a mineral but still represents a colour not
> describable by other colour terms + modification.  This must be a
> criterion, too.

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