Re: Punctiation and pronunciation in AmE and BrE

Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:
"James Silverton" <not.jim.silverton@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
[...]
I believe Scottish Gaelic uses the same word for blue
and green.

The same can apply to Welsh. They have separate words in modern Welsh,
but the word now used for "green" doesn't seem (in my of course
restricted experience and unreliable recall) to appear in placenames.

That's not a matter of sensation, but rather perception. (Although
the presence of people with various forms of color blindness implies
that there are likely differences in sensation as well.)

Berlin and Kay established in the '60s that speakers of different
languages had different numbers of "basic" colors[1] (from two to
eleven), that there is an order to which colors are added to a
language[2], and that even among languages at the same level, the
boundaries between colors are drawn differently and there will be
smaller differences in boundary between speakers of the same
language. Languages will also differ (but speakers of a language
largely agree) if shown a grid of color tiles and asked to point to
"the best example of red".

There have been some challenges and tweaks to the theory over the
years, but I believe it's still considered to be basically sound.

[1] Roughly those that aren't seen by speakers as "a kind of" some
other color, tend to be given early when speakers are asked to
list colors, and tend not to be names of things.

[2] If there are two colors, they will be roughly "light" and "dark".
The third color will be roughly "red". The fourth and fifth will
be "yellow"(ish) and "green"(ish), in either order. The sixth
will be "blue"(ish). The seventh will be "brown"(ish). The rest
apparently have no set order.

Norman Douglas has a brief reflection on the use of colour words in /Old
Calabria/. He argues for the decadence of the local culture from his
personal impressions of a decline in the variety of personal given names
and colour vocabulary. How reliable he was, I'm not qualified to say;
but he claims that in at least one case (I don't remember if there were
more) the word for "blue" had disappeared, leaving a speaker able to say
only that the sky was "a kind of dead colour". (This seems so unlikely
that I'm going to have to read it again; but that's worth doing in its
own right.)

--
Mike.


.

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