Re: Tsuhon: tentative phonology

Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> > Yeah.  Strange word.  `Blue or green'.  I never
> > understood the theory
> > about colours, though it seems typical to have just
> > one word for the
> > color of grass and of the sky.
The difference between green and blue isn't as great as the difference
between red and green.  If you don't believe that, try playing Uno in
poor lighting.  :-)  I did that once.  It was very difficult to tell the
green and blues apart, but it was easy to tell red and yellow apart.

The basic pattern is:
Black White
Red
Yellow, Green
Blue
Brown
Pink Orange Grey Purple

That is, if a language has one or more colors from any row, it also has
all the colors above.  Keep in mind that these names refer to the
"focus" of the colors, the color that is seen as being the best example
of that color.  Languages with smaller color vocabularies tend to have
larger ranges of each of these.  Like, one with just black, white, red,
yellow (I think PIE is reconstructed that way?) would probably use
"black" for dark blues and greens, dark greys, dark browns, "white" may
cover light blues, light greys, "red" will probably cover orange,
reddish browns, and "yellow" may extend into green.

ObConlang, Uatakassí colors are:
Black: Vaziú
White: Kláu
Red: Gazínu
Yellow: Tají
Green: Maisiása
Blue: Mlál

I'm not sure exactly of the ranges of these colors, but red probably
covers orange and reddish brown, blue covers purple and possibly grey.

--
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