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Apparently languages differ in the number of basic colour words they have (basic ones being those with a simple name rather than a compound one (blue rather than sky blue or greenish blue) and reasonably common (no cerise)). It seems that if you know how many of these basic colour words a language has it's possible to make a pretty good guess which ones are in and which ones aren't.
The list (from David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language) goes:
* black and white
* red
* green yellow
* blue
* brown
* purple pink orange grey
So a language that has a word lower down the list (brown for example) will have all the words higher up the list, but may or may not have the words lower down the list. Where there's more than one word in a slot the order in which they're added is random. A language with four words, for example, may have black, white, red, green or black, white, red, yellow.
Bingley
Bingley
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In reply to:
barefoot boy with cheeks of tan
Harking back to another recent thread which was explored ad absurdum, there is a famous shaggy dog story involving a Chinese lumber merchant and a pet bear with no hair on its feet. It ends, "Ho there, boyfoot bear with teaks of Chan!" (humbly begging pardon for that
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old hand
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old hand
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* black and white
* red
* green yellow
* blue
* brown
* purple pink orange grey
Does this mean that English is extremely sophistocated with maroon, indigo, teal, crimson, scarlet, beige and navy being common words?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Jazz asked: Does this mean that English is extremely sophistocated with maroon, indigo, teal, crimson, scarlet, beige and navy being common words?
Possibly, using Bingley's definition. More likely, however, is the packrat mentality of English speakers. Never have one word for something when 50 will do.
Having so many words for colours may appear sophisticated, but everyone, and I mean everyone has a markedly different mental rendering of each named colour. It's plain inefficient. It's also what gives the language its charm ...
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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In reply to:
* black and white
* red
* green yellow
* blue
* brown
* purple pink orange grey
Does this mean that English is extremely sophistocated with maroon, indigo, teal, crimson, scarlet, beige and navy being common words?
Not really. We're only talking about basic colours. Crimson and scarlet are types of red so they don't count. Similarly navy is a type of blue and beige is a type of brown. As for maroon, indigo, and teal, have you ever tried to get a group of people, never mind AWADers, to agree on what colours these words actually refer to? The basic colours may have fuzzy boundaries, but everyone who isn't actually colour blind agrees on the central colour covered by each term.
Bingley
Bingley
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I saw a fabulous exhibit once which was basically a rectangle of gradate colour. One end of the rainbow to the other from left to right, darkest of dark to palest of pale up and down. So far, not too exciting, but on top of this colour scale were drawn boundaries, which looked totally arbitrary to an English speaker, but actually mapped the colour range covered by specific words in another language. (I think the other language was something Polynesian, but my memory has gone...)
The fascinating part was staring at a polygon ranging from pale green to deep orange (or wahtever) and trying to 'see' the simliarity in these colours that made the Polynesians see them all as variations of the same thing.
Words really do affect how people see the world.
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packrat mentality...plain inefficient
I can't agree with many of your comments here, Cap. I think the proliferation of different terms in English represents nothing more nor less than the rich cultural history of an island race that has always looked outwards - whether defensively or as trade-inspired travel.
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Mav said: I can't agree with many of your comments here, Cap. I think the proliferation of different terms in English represents nothing more nor less than the rich cultural history of an island race that has always looked outwards - whether defensively or as trade-inspired travel.True. But we don't unload linguistic leftovers, we simply add them to the pile on the side of the plate. How many other languages have so many words for the same thing - albeit with slight differences in meaning or usage in context? I stand by my statement and I believe I can do that without contradicting yours!  I wasn't commenting on whether this was good or bad. It is inefficient, as I said. From a technical, linguistic viewpoint. I wasn't commenting on the cultural background or beauty or otherwise of the language. It is and has all of those things. But it is inefficient!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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inefficientStill disagree. It is not inherently inefficient to have seven different words, if they convey seven shades of meaning. You could more accurately argue that more impoverished langauges like say French  , which might only drum up three correlative words, is the technically inefficient langauge, having to compromise accuracy in favour of a smaller vocabulary.
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if we had (say) only eight (words for) colors, what do you suppose the Big Box of (64?) Crayolas would look like?
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