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

>> My problem was, for example, 'beige'.  It clearly distinct from brown,
>> but one could imagine situations in which uncareful speakers refer to
>> it with 'brown'.  I can also imagine such situations for 'orange' and
>> 'red', though, so I cannot determine without a more formal definition
>> of 'basic color' whether 'beige' is a basic colour in German.
>
>A quick Google image search of the word 'beige' illustrates how unstable
>this term is across speakers. Apparently it can refer to a slightly
>yellowish brown, a brownish gray and even a color approaching white with a
>hint of tan.
Unstable? Having a range that includes yellowish brow, brownish
gray and whitish tan is no more "unstable" than the very wide
range comprised by brown (which is used as cover term for colour
perceptions as different as sienna, umber and ochre). I think
the concept of beige is as clear and stable as that of brown:
brown is any shade between red and yellow that is not vivid
(the vivid ones are "orange"); beige is any light insaturated
shade between red and yellow that is not more reddish than
yellowish - which is a subset of the above definition of brown,
unless in the speaker's idiolect beige has become an independent
category and then his definition of brown is the above minus
that of beige.

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