Odp: Color Words.

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 293
Date: 1999-11-19

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Odegard
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 1999 8:43 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Color Words.

Proto-Indo-European probably had what Berlin and Kay classify as a Stage II color system, which includes only black, white and red; Berlin and Kay use the term 'row' for red, as the semantic space occupied by 'red' in such a system is not that you find in larger systems. 'Row' stands for red-yellow.
 
Homeric Greek would seem to also be Stage II, or perhaps, transition to Stage III, where either yellow or blue-green (what Berlin and Kay call 'grue') are added to the system.
 
Stage IV has both grue and yellow. Stage V fully discriminates green and blue. Stage VI adds brown. Stage VII adds pink, purple, orange and gray.
 
It needs to be noted that different languages break up color differently. Russian, so I understand, breaks up blue and green differently than English. Russian blue is not English blue.
 
At the earlier stages, the distinction between black and white also needs to be widened. The semantic space would seem closer to that conveyed by English 'light' and 'dark'.
 
After *h1reud, erythros in Greek (which Piotr has covered), the next IE color term is *ghel, which is ancestral to the English words yellow, gold. There is also the term *h1elu, 'dull red'.
 
Mark Odegard.
I wouldn't be that dogmatic about Berlin & Kay's classification. Their generalisations have a physiological basis and are borne our by many languages, but they cannot aspire to absolute validity. What colour terms a language has depends to some degree on universals of colour perception and semantic evolution, but also on cultural factors such as the everyday needs of the speakers of that language. Grey is apparently a luxury that you can't afford until you climb to stage VII, but if there's a lot of grey around you and the need to distinguish various greyish hues is vitally important to you, you may develop terms for shades of grey even if your grass is still grue. PIE seems to have had some "grey" words, such as *kas-no- 'whitish-grey, the colour of a hare's fur'. And of course it is very likely that some colour terms which existed in PIE are accidentally unattested.
 
Piotr