tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Nov 29 13:34:53 1995
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Re: Colors? What colors?
- From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Colors? What colors?
- Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 16:34:40 -0500
- In-reply-to: <[email protected]> (message from Adam Walker onWed, 29 Nov 1995 10:43:11 -0800)
>Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 10:43:11 -0800
>From: Adam Walker <[email protected]>
> English BTW has the maximum number of unique
>color words that have been recorded for any language -- 11! (black,
>white, red, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple, brown, pink, grey)
>The multitude of other color-words in English are dirrived from the
>names of other objects and not concidered "unique."
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. I notice this particularly
when I try translating the colors you mentioned into Hebrew, which divides
its colors up similarly to English. In order: shachor, lavan, adom,
kachol, yarok, tzahov, katom, segol, chum, varod, afor (the CaCoC pattern
is peculiar to color-words, though not to all of them). What makes this
surprising is that all these seem to be pretty color-only terms (maybe
except for varod, but probably that too), and there's also t'chelet, which
I like to use as an example to Hebrew-speakers about how different
languages whack up the color-space differently: t'chelet is sky-blue,
basically, ranging out to turquoise. No Hebrew-speaker would ever call the
sky "kachol"; it's definitely t'chelet. But then as I write this, it
occurs to me that maybe t'chelet was originally the name of the dye used
for it...
~mark