Re: OT: terms for people with different hair colours

Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>:

> On 2008-10-23 R A Brown wrote:
> > As for hair color in the Iliad, cf.
> > http://www.white-history.com/homer01.htm
> >
>
> One wonders just how light hair would have been
> to be considered yellow by the Mediterraneans.
Considering the hair colours I've heard modern Greeks describe as "blond", I
expect that quite dark would do.

The implication being, I suppose, that if there's less actual variation in hair
colour among some language's speakers, they'll just make the distinctions finer,
more-or-less conserving the number of *categories* as compared to a more
variable group. This would be empirically testable, but I've no idea if anyone's
actually tried to test it.

--
Andreas Johansson