Re: OT: terms for people with different hair colours

On Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:08:13 -0500, Matthew Turnbull
<ave.jor@...> wrote:
>OK, so English has, as I understand it the following
>[snip]
>Anyhow, so I was wondering what all we know here about hair colour based
>person terms, and if anyone has given it any thought in a conlang. I have
>yet to give it serious thought, but after realizing there did not seem to be
>one for black hair, I have started thinking about it.
IRL these terms are useful only when nearly everyone you could be speaking of
is of Caucasian race.  Non-Caucasians almost universally have black or nearly-
black hair and black or very-dark-brown eyes.

Color-based person-terms based on skin-colour would be more universally
useful.

Of course, in Natlangs, for most of history most of any common acquaintances
of any speaker of any natlang and any addressee, would be of just one race
(whatever race the speaker or the addressee or the bulk of L1-speakers of
that natlang belonged to).  Unless that happened to be Caucasian, most color-
based person-terms would not have been very useful until, say, the Crusades,
or the Spanish Armada, or 1492, or some such event.

Earlier than that, before the barbarian invasions of the Western Roman Empire,
most ethnic groups were in-bred enough that differences in hair-color, other
than those due to age, would not have been common, either.

Did any Classical languages have such terms?  Other than "greybeard" and the
like?

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