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

On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, Daniel Asserbo wrote:
>
> On 01.11.2005, at 16:28, Carsten Becker wrote:
>
> > I've once had a PDF, though, where they said that there are
> > certain tendencies which colours a language has independend
> > terms for when it has specific basic colours. I just can't
> > find it ATM, because it's on some CD. It's also curious that
> > some languages lump green and blue into one group.
>
> Since this was just mentioned in my linguistics classes, I've
> got some material here that says that (according to Berlin & Kay
> who examined 98 languages), there are 11 basic color terms and
> their distribution is the following:
>
> I: white and black (none of the 98 languages didn't have these)
> II: I + red
> IIIa/b: II + yellow or green
> IV: II + yellow and green
> V: IV + blue
> VI: V + brown
> VII: VI + any of these: purple, pink, orange, grey (no language
> had more than 11 basic (monomorphemic?) color terms).
I have a slight problem with this classification.  Malay has the
following monomorphemic colour terms -

putih - white
hitam - dark -includes brown and black
merah - red - includes red-browns and red-purples
kuning - yellow - includes orange
hijau - green
biru - blue
pérang [new spelling may be either perang or pirang]
- a bright red[-brown] hair-colour (see note * below)
ungu - blue-purple (see note ** below)
nila - indigo (see note *** below)

kelabu - grey is derived from abu - ash by prefixing keX- where X
takes the form l in the context of a following vowel, so is
bimorphemic (dimorphemic?); it means 'ashy'.

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

orange - is sometimes borrowed from English to refer to the fruit,
but the colour is usually called kuning ie yellow.

(*) 'pérang' usually occurs in only in the context 'merah pérang',
meaning 'bright red'.  Note that Malays' hair is almost always
black, but that a reddish-brown can occur under some
circumstances, usually only in children, in much the same way as
red-brown to even blond hair can occur among full-blood
Australian Aborigines.  'merah pérang' has a variant 'merah
merang' with the same meaning, probably derived from it for
greater assonance; also, /m/ is often inserted before /p/ and
sometimes replaces it.  I think it likely that 'pérang' may ultimately
derive from peX- + iram.  'iram' means blushing or changing colour.
Of Malay skin, that means from a cool or neutral brown to a
reddish brown.  The only reason I'm discussing 'pérang' at all is
because it appears in one pocket dictionary with the explanation
'brown (tea-colour) of hair', implying it might be used alone.
However, my Malay informants all told me unequivocally that
'brown' was either 'hitam manis' (lit. 'sweet dark') or 'merah'
(red), depending on which brown it was (skin can be 'hitam manis',
but brown bread is 'roti merah' (red bread), and what we call
'brown' rice is so clearly red to Malays that even in Malaysian
English it's called 'red rice'!)  None of them ever volunteered
either 'pérang' or 'merang', with or without 'merah' in front.  So I
think that the dictionary records a word that probably never
means 'brown' as we understand it in spoken Malay - I don't recall
ever hearing it spoken.

(**) the English colour term 'purple' covers any mixture of red
blue, indigo or violet, and to many speakers, includes both indigo
and violet themselves - the colours on the rainbow spectrum that
lie even further away from red than blue does.  Malay casts the
redder purples into the pot labelled 'merah', and the bluer purples
into the pot labelled 'ungu'.  Neither 'merah' nor 'ungu' covers
all the colours of our 'purple'.

(***) nila is the indigo dye; the word for the indigo plant, tarum, is
unrelated.


I conclude that Malay has no monomorphemic word for 'brown'
that distinguishes it from 'red'; this leaves me to make the
interesting claim that Malay at least represents another class,
namely -

VIII:  V + blue-purple + indigo.

I'd hazard a guess that other Austronesian languages also use a
similar set of colours, many derived from the plants they found
most useful in a forest lifestyle that mixes (or mixed) hunting and
gathering with slash-and-burn shifting agriculture.  Because so
many of these are languages of people recently settled in a more
sedentary way of life, some may still use yet other colour terms
that no Westerner has yet observed, or thought to ask for a
translation of! :-)


> (That's a total of 22 possibilities, whereas there would be 2048
> possibilities to pick any of these 11 basic color terms.)
2^11 = 2048 ... OK.

Now, let's count the classes:
#1. > I: white and black
#2. > II: I + red
#3 and #4. > IIIa/b: II + yellow or green
#5. > IV: II + yellow and green
#6. > V: IV + blue
#7. > VI: V + brown
#? > VII: VI + any of these: purple, pink, orange, grey
2^4 = 16 different combinations of from 0 to 4 of these colours,
less the 1 with 0 of them, leaves 15.
7 + 15 = 22, as you said.  So these are #8 to #22 inclusive.

And finally,
#23.  VIII:  V + blue-purple + indigo.


> As for "lumping green and blue into one group", those who only
> have one term for both green and blue, still agree on a "typical"
> hue of this color, which would then be what we (who have
> seperate terms) would perceive as some kind of green.
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'.

Is there any scientific evidence for the assertion that the speakers
of all languages -
> ... who only
> have one term for both green and blue, still agree on a "typical"
> hue of this color, which would then be what we (who have
> seperate terms) would perceive as some kind of green
?  And who is the 'we' of this green-perception?  If it were my wife
and myself, there is every chance that 'we' will NOT perceive this
'typical' colour as being 'green'.  In short, I think the assertion
above lacks a testable meaning, so in the spirit of scientific
scepticism, I doubt whether I could assent to it.

To complicate things a little - one of my informants told me (but I
don't know on what evidence) that the words biru - blue and
kuning - yellow are loanwords borrowed by Malay in historic times.
Which would imply that class VIII is actually an offshoot of class
IIIb (white, black, red, green) rather than of class V, in this tree
of many colours.

It also presupposes that Malay speakers had no real use for
distinguishing the colour 'biru' from 'hijau' until relatively recently;
presumably the blue of the sky was not of great interest to them, as
it had little practical significance whether the sky was blue or grey -
in the tropics, it rains most days without causing hardship or even a
slight chill.  On the other hand, weather terms for storm, wind, flood
and lightning were of great practical use to them  Like landsmen and
sailors everywhere, they had a variety of different terms to
distinguish the different kinds of wind and cloud.  But that they had
a separate term for 'indigo', which most English speakers lump in
with 'blue', shows they simply making different distinctions when
they were useful to them.


> > > What set of monomorphemic color terms does your conlang
> > > and/or conculture include?
> >
> >  macárya - black     tuvo - red
> >  maca - white        piha - yellow
> >  camaya - gray       leno - blue
> >                      dano - green
> >
> >  aruno - brown       avirang - golden
> >  canto - turquoise   idian - silver
> >  velato - orange     sarvo - copper
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?  If we don't, I think the list I
gave above is essentially complete for Malay.  But if we do, for
Malay, I should add terms for -

 o ... metal colours, eg perak -silver, emas - gold, suasa - an alloy of
copper and gold, besi - iron, timah - tin, tembaga - brass, perunggu
- bronze, ... ;

 o ... plant colours, eg jambu - rose-apple, limau - lime, kesumba -
anatto (red dye), manggis - mangosteen, delima - pomegranate,
inai - henna, ... ;

  o ... gemstone colours, eg intan - diamond, zamrud - emerald,
mutiara - pearl, pirus - turquoise, ...

These lists are essentially open-ended, and will vary from one
geographic area to another.  There are also colour terms used
only of the skins or coats of animals, or of a certain species of
animals, as there are in English; this list may also be extensive.


> > Beige would be "light orange" or something. I haven't
> > thought very much about the colours yet. Or should I kick
> > out turqoise and put in beige instead?
>
> Berlin & Kay would suggest you purple and pink ;-)
>
> Greetings from Potsdam, Germany
> Daniel "Asserbo" Quernheim

/*begin rant*/
I always suspect these scholastic classificatory schemes, as
although they may convey useful insights, they also risk throwing
out the baby with the bath water.  In the case of Malay, the
scheme reported by Daniel seems to treat all colours as essentially
_abstract_ colours, and ignores that some colour terms have
restricted fields of application.  In English it would be considered,
at best, perverse and, most likely, simply wrong, to call the colour
of a cock's comb 'bay', but that's what we call the colour of a
horse with a light red-brown coat.  Yet a worse flaw of this way of
classifying languages is that assumes that the external referents
of the phenomena we call 'colour' are universally capable of being
segregated into the same set.  In short, it assumes that it is valid
to equate English 'red' with Malay 'merah'.  However, the truth is
more subtle and complex than that.  In a given context, we can and
should translate 'merah' as 'red' and 'ungu' as 'purple'; whilst in
another context, we can and should translate 'merah' as 'purple'
and 'ungu' as 'blue'.  Neither translation is an equation; it is a
best possible working approximation.  The categories of the two
languages simply do not coincide.  The reason for this is clear - the
needs of the speakers are different, and thus their languages have
evolved (or been designed!) to fit those needs.
/*end rant*/

The most useful insights given by this classification are, I think,
1. that most languages employ a fairly limited set of basic abstract
colour contrasts, and find this sufficient for everyday, non-
specialist use; and
2. that the most basic contrast is the most extreme - between light
and dark (white and black); and the second is between 'hot' colours
(red) and the rest.
Beyond these, I think the further differentiation of colours is most
probably much more culture-specific than the classification shows.


Regards,
Yahya

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