tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Dec 03 21:56:58 1995

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Re: Colors? What colors?



In a message dated 95-11-29 16:42:22 EST, you write:

>Interesting.  I'd long known of the "hierarchy" of colors (incidentally,
>Nick Nicholas believes that Okrand was playing a joke on linguists when he
>picked his color-words, since I believe they conflate colors which no
>language with as many color-words as Klingon would.  But that's a story for
>him to tell).  But I'm surprised to learn that English has the current
>known maximum, and that there are only eleven. 

Chinese Mandarin, until recent times, had very few words for colors:  ching =
black, blue, green; hwang = brown, yellow; bai = white; hung = red.  lyu =
green, eg. was added later.

In recent times Chinese has added attributive words to distinguish colors:
 shen = dark, deep; ching = light.

peHruS


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