Re: What counts as a basic color word?

There may be a morphological angle to this too: maybe basic colour terms are
those that behave as single morphemes: thus 'red' can meaningfully take
affixes (redden, redder, reddish, redly...) while 'maroon' cannot. Thus
redden = to become red, but **maroonen = to become maroon. It'd be tempting
also to say that basic colour terms should be base lexical terms that can
cause, but not take, derivation. Thus 'teal' (the colour) is not a BCT since
it is derived from another, semantically distinct but identically spelt,
unit - one which can take affixes and which is a base lexeme ('there are
teals swimming on the lake' - not a good example as animals often don't
pluralise en masse, but the principle is valid, I think).
On this basis, 'orange' is not a BCT of English.
Mike
>         Color universals are fascinating, but I'm trying to get at the
underlying
> methodology. What divides a "basic" color from an "extended" color, either
in
> theory or in semantics. For instance, as Chris Bates mentioned, Russian
has
> two words for blue, _sinij_ and _goluboj_ which are dark blue and light
blue
> respectively. I could translate them as "navy" and "teal," but that
implies
> that they are "extended" color words. They're not. In Russian, they are
> "basic" color terms, like green and blue in English.

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