Re: CHAT: Orange

----- Original Message -----
From: Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Sent: Tuesday, June 04, 2002 11:13 AM



> You mean the word "orange" didn't exist before? in how many colours did
you cut
> the rainbow then? (the 7 colours of the rainbow are extremely traditional,
in
> France at least, and imply that "orange" was already well known a long
time
> ago. I thought it was a European thing)
Strange as it may seem, but Ukrainian has no native names for "violet" and
"orange" -- we use 'internationalisms' here like |fioletowyj| and
|oranzhewyj|; the latter is still thought 'bad Ukr.', and purists prefer
|zhowtoharjachyj|, lit. "hot yellow". Besides, |blakytnyj| for "light blue"
may be a borrowing from Polish |ble,kitny|...

> > If the Dutch lights go red, orange, green, perhaps it's a national
> > thing?
> >
>
> No, in France it's the same. After all, it's the colour of the light,
isn't it?
> And I didn't know there would be countries who would use orange as the
middle
> colour of traffic lights but call it yellow. That sounds particularly
crazy to
> me (it's kind of asking for troubles :)) ). On the other hand, I know some
> countries do use the colour yellow for the middle light, and for them I
can
> understand that they use the word "yellow" to refer to it then.
Traffic lightes here are |cherwonyj| "red", |zhowtyj| "yellow" and |zelenyj|
"green", though in fact the middle one can be of quite different shades from
almost orange to lemon. So, many Ukrainian speakers divide orange color
shades between red and yellow.

> Christophe.
Cheers,
Yitzik
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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