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

Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:

> Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
> > Torquoise is a fancy name for bluish greens and greenish blues. Beige
> > is a species  of brown. Aqua is Latin for water - I'm not even sure
> > what colour it's supposed to refer to.
>
> "Aqua" is short for "aquamarine" and is similar to turquoise: the color
> whose focus is in the overlap between blue and green.
>
> There's a notorious stereotype that women are more discriminating in
> color names than men, at least among anglophones (possibly reinforced by
> the much higher rate of red-green color-blindness among men).  My wife,
> for example, insists that aqua is no more a kind of blue (or green)
> than orange is a kind of red (or yellow)
The shift from _brandgul_ "fire red" to _orange_* for orange has happened in my
mother's 'lect during her life time (she's now 46), so I'm convinced neither by
the stereotype nor by that justification for the basicness of aqua!

My instincts tell me that red is much more basic than orange, which in turn is
much more so than aqua. But that, I guess, has more to do with perception than
with linguistics. Looking linguistically, it seems to me that, in English,
orange and aqua are the more similar pair - named for objects and of non-native
origin. Let's disqualify both from basic colour term status! :)

In Swedish, it's trickier - _orange_ is simply a borrowed colour term, the fruit
being _apelsin_**, while I'm not aware of any term corresponding to 'aqua'.
There is _turkos_*** "turquoise", but at least for me, any _turkos_ can be
classified as _grön_ "green" or (usually) _blå_ "blue". _Orange_ is basic in
that there are hues I would not feel comfortable describing with any other word
- _turkos_ emphatically is not.

* That's, of course, [U'r`anS], modulo 'lectal variation. Swedish spelling was
messed up enough before all those frenchy loans! Note that it inflects evilly -
the weak masculine form is _orange_ [U'r`anSE]! Other endings are simply added
to that damnable 'e' - _orangea_ [U'r`anSa], _oranget_ [U'r`anSt].

** [apEl'si:n]. Etymologically "Chinese apple", but synchronically unitary; the
similarity to _kinesiskt äpple_ [SI'ne:sIs(k)t 'Ep:,lE] is not remotely obvious.)

*** [t8r`'ko:s]

                                                         Andreas