Re: Survey(?) of ConLangs' Calendars and Colors and Kinterms

On Fri, 04 Nov 2005, 02:37 CET, Yahya Abdal-Aziz wrote:

 > merah muda - pink is literally 'red young' or light red.

Nice idea to call lighter hues "young".

 > I find this an odd assertion - do all English speakers
 > 'agree on a
 > "typical" hue of the colour purple'?  Here English
 > speakers are
 > 'lumpers' while Malay speakers are 'splitters'.  Yet two
 > people
 > whose L1 is English - my wife and myself - and who both
 > have some
 > practical knowledge of colour as artists cannot agree on
 > which
 > blue-greens to call 'blue' and which to call 'green'.  I
 > will often
 > call something 'blue' that she will call 'green'.  And she
 > will call
 > 'violet' what to me is definitely not 'violet' but
 > 'purple'; whilst she
 > will call my 'violet', 'blue'.

Similar here. You remember that standard monotone grayish
background in Windows 98? I say it's gray and my mother
claims it's green. I'm a bit red-blind, though. My mother
also told me that she and her mother regularly disagreed
about turquoise. (As a colour-blind, of course I mix up
certain shades of purple and blue or orange and brown etc.
anyway so I'm not a reliable source when talking about
colours.)

 > Perhaps I missed something here - were we also counting
 > those
 > monomorphemic colour terms that simpy reuse the name of
 > some
 > substance familiar to the culture?

No, we were not asked for the colours of substances. I just
added them.

Yours,
Carsten