Timeline for How diachronically stable are color terms?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
22 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 14, 2016 at 5:00 | answer | added | Anixx | timeline score: 0 | |
| Jan 10, 2016 at 11:20 | answer | added | Sir Cornflakes | timeline score: 6 | |
| Jan 9, 2016 at 1:12 | answer | added | Russell Richie | timeline score: 0 | |
| May 16, 2014 at 3:43 | comment | added | TKR | On the PIE question, if you can get hold of Mallory and Adams' Oxford Intro to PIE and the PIE World, they give reconstructed vocab in most semantic domains, and I believe there are a few pages on IE color terms. | |
| May 16, 2014 at 2:25 | comment | added | neubau | @TKR: I've edited the question in response to your comments. | |
| May 16, 2014 at 2:23 | history | edited | neubau | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Rewrote argument for stability of color terms, added notes
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| May 16, 2014 at 2:08 | comment | added | Alex B. | not exactly what you asked for but still relevant - Kay 1975 www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/Var&Change.pdf | |
| May 15, 2014 at 11:25 | comment | added | user3578 | For a really interesting read, Guy Deutscher's "through the language glass" gives a really interesting and, at least seemingly, quite thorough look at the history of this topic. | |
| May 15, 2014 at 3:50 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackLinguist/status/466787605842255873 | ||
| May 15, 2014 at 3:26 | comment | added | TKR | primary color words can be considered part of the core vocabulary of any language - this isn't necessarily true. Some languages have been argued to lack any words corresponding to English-type pure color terms. (For an example see H. Conklin 1955, "Hanunóo color categories", Southwest Journal of Anthropology 11:339-44.) | |
| May 15, 2014 at 3:23 | comment | added | hippietrail | @TKR: Agreed, however I thought if it's worth noting the one point it's worth noting both. It's all pretty interesting in a "linguistics defies intuition" kinda way (-: | |
| May 15, 2014 at 3:21 | comment | added | TKR | @hippietrail That's true, but given that that neurological fact doesn't stop very many languages from conflating "blue" and "green", I don't know to what extent it might constrain semantic change in the color domain, if at all. | |
| May 15, 2014 at 3:09 | history | edited | hippietrail |
edited tags
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| May 15, 2014 at 3:08 | comment | added | hippietrail | @TKR: It's not really accurate to say "no clear internal boundaries" as the human eye is based on three kinds of wavelength perceptors, so red, green, and blue have some kind of natural boundaries, for what that's worth. | |
| May 15, 2014 at 3:04 | comment | added | hippietrail | @dainichi: Yes I should have said "sense" rather than word, but it's probably enough for people to still go and look up the topic to get a real understanding (-: But thanks for the heads up - always expect the unexpected in every field of linguistics (= | |
| May 14, 2014 at 21:09 | comment | added | TKR | I would assume that color terms are very unstable because of the nature of the color domain, which has no clear internal boundaries. It should be very easy for a term to shift gradually from meaning e.g. "blue" to "turquoise" to "green" to "yellow". | |
| May 14, 2014 at 14:28 | comment | added | jlawler |
For I-E, you probly want to read Buck's treatment of color terms (in Chapter 15 "Sense Perception," sections 15.51 SEE through 15.69 YELLOW, pp 1040-59) in his Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages.
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| May 14, 2014 at 11:36 | comment | added | dainichi | @hippietrail, strictly speaking, Japanese has had みどり for a very long time, but the use of it for the color is more recent. Also, when traffic lights were first introduced in Japan, they were legally referred to as 緑色信号, but people seemed to prefer 青信号, so that name took over. Your comment might lead people to believe that the color みどり is newer than traffic lights, which is not the case. | |
| May 14, 2014 at 5:03 | comment | added | neubau | Actually this question was prompted by a recent Chinese SE discussion, interesting but inconclusive, about the Chinese words for green and blue. It’s here: chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/6832/… | |
| May 14, 2014 at 4:41 | comment | added | hippietrail | Apparently it is very difficult to make sense of colour terms in Latin texts, as if they must've shifted but not in straightforward ways. Japan aquired their word for "green" (みどり) so recently that green traffic lights are still referred to as "blue" (あおい). | |
| May 14, 2014 at 2:49 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | Russian word for 'red', красный, derives from the word that means 'beautiful', this word for 'red' is found only in Russian. The Russian word for 'brown', коричневый, derives from 'кора', 'bark of trees'. Words for 'yellow' and 'green' are obviously related in all the Slavic languages. | |
| May 14, 2014 at 2:31 | history | asked | neubau | CC BY-SA 3.0 |