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

--On Wednesday, April 21, 2004 11:21 PM +0200 Henrik Theiling
<theiling@...> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Following the discussion about colours, I wanted to know how many
> basic terms German has.  I don't know.  Yet.
>
> At least, I found 'türkis', which is a clearly a different colour than
> 'grün' and 'blau'.  It's in between.  I would, intuitively, categorise
> it as basic because no other color term applies to 'türkis'.
>
> It was not listed in Danny's Russian colour list, so I looked it up in
> my dictionary and found 'biryuza'.  I have no idea whether that is a
> common or basic term in Russian, but at least it was not in the list
> of the twelve basic colours of Russian.
>
> But what is a basic colour?  How can I count those of German?  I took
> the Russian list and translated it and found no equivalent for the two
> blues.  There is only one blue in German.  But 'türkis' was clearly
> missing.  Is something else missing?
>
> What about 'beige'?  One could argue that it is a light brown, but
> really, it is not brown, it is 'beige'.  It could evenly be described
> as ugly dark yellow (which, I assume, is not a basic colour term...)
> But it is 'beige'.
>
> Hmm...
>
> Bye,
>   Henrik
>
From what I remember, the criteria for the studies done on color universals
excluded as basic color terms all loan words ("beige", "magenta"),
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). 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.

Replies