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

Yahya Abdal-Aziz wrote:

>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.
And later on:

>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?
It seems extremely unlikely to me that a language would distinguish blue,
blue-purple and indigo, but not eg. orange and brown; I would suspect that
"indigo" were also primarily the name of a substance - that is, the name of
the dye solution, not of its color. (It doesn't exactly matter that there's
a separate word for the indigo plant too. Especially since there is not a
single "the" indigo plant.)

This of course doesn't override blue-purple (could we say that it's
"phonemically" just plain purple?) being included before brown is - which is
of course interesting too.

Also:

>The most useful insights given by this classification are, I think,
...
>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.
So, with system IIIa, you'd analyze "red" = "dark hot", "yellow" = "light
hot"? Interesting, but what about IIIb then?? Green seems to be somewhat
neutral with regards to both the light/dark and hot/cold dichotomies.

John Vertical