Re: Color system

On Thu, Oct 14, 2004 at 12:07:33AM -0000, caeruleancentaur wrote:
> Has any of the group worked with colors in his conlang or
> conculture?
Yep. In fact, Ebisédian is inherently based on color symbolism on the
part of its speakers.

> There is a color system in Senyecan.  6 is a mystical number in the
> culture & there are a lot of groups of & multiples of 6.
The Ebisédi aren't particularly mystical about anything, but they
*are* obsessed with the numbers 3 and 5, and weave them into just
about everything, including the fabric of their language.


> There are 6 basic colors:
>
> red,     orange,  yellow, green,  blue,    purple.
> rúúdhin, véélrin, bádjin, dhálin, módhrin, víswin.
In Ebisédian, there are 5 basic colors: red (ki'), green (ci'), blue
(roi'), white (Kii'i), and black (bui'). The first 3 colors are
considered to be a group, and all 5 form another group. The first
group is cognate with many, many triplets that occur in the language,
among which are:
	ke, ce, re	- correlative particles (ala the Attic Greek
			  correlatives, except this one is 3-way)
	ka-, cu-, ro-	- noun association markers
	kei', 3cei', 3rei'	- the first 3 quantitative numbers
	ikei', icei', irei'	- the first 3 qualitative numbers

It is worth mentioning that the noun association markers are
essentially a way to "tag" certain nouns with one of the 3 colors so
that they can be "matched up" with similarly tagged pronouns, used
when gender/number distinctions are not sufficient to resolve
ambiguity.

The color words themselves are also used by Ferochromon physicists to
refer to certain fundamental elements of their world.

The last 2 colors are also cognate with many words, although not to
the extent the first 3 are.


> Between each of these is an intermediary color:
[...]

The other colors in Ebisédian are:
	yellow		si'mi
	bluish-green	o'mi
	violet/purple	Pi'mi
	grey, muddy	mui'

> Each of these 12 colors can then be modified by 4 different prefixes:
[...]

Hmm. Ebisédian would have prepositions for achieving this, although I
haven't actually coined them yet.


> If my math is correct, that's a total of 71 colors.
[...]

Ebisédian probably has a lot of color words as well, but I just
haven't worked them out adequately.


T

--
Caffeine underflow. Brain dumped.