Re: A unified plan for Minza colors

Ingmar Roerdinkholder wrote:
> The Minza colour system is very interesting, but how did you get the names
> of the colours? I thought I recognized some "degenerated" forms here. But
> maybe it's just my Dutch ear ;-)
>
> d-iki < indigo; Dutch degenerated pronunciation would be["Indikou]>~>d-iki?
> fildi < violet; Dutch <violet> can be pronounced [fi@"lEt] ~> fildi?
> kirvi < yellow; Dutch <geel>, older <geluw> ["Xe:lyw] ~> kirvi?
> zerd-i< green; Slavonic <zelony> etc ~> zerd-i?
> nuxc^i< red; German <nuszig> nutty, nut-like ~> nuxc^i?
The basic Minza words for human colors are from Lindiga
(http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/Lindiga/colors.html), which used a lot
of distorted words from other languages in its original version. The
word for "indigo" is indeed a distorted version of "indigo", through
Lindiga "ntiki"; initial "nt-" in Lindiga, which came to be pronounced
[ndZ] when followed by "i", was systematically borrowed as [dZ]
(d-stroke) in Minza. "Fildi" is also from "violet", through the Lindiga
word "virlti".

"Red" is actually closer to Dutch "rood"; Spanish "rojo" and German
"rot" both contributed to the Lindiga word "rnuchti" (o -> u and r -> n`
are not uncommon changes in Lindiga borrowings). Palatalization in
Lindiga caused the final "t" to be pronounced as [tS].

"Green" was originally "werrti" in Lindiga (clearly related to Italian
"verdi", Spanish "verde", etc.), but I changed the initial w- to z- to
make the borrowing less obvious. It's very likely that my association of
"z-" with "green" is derived from Slavic languages.