Re: O.T: Linguistics

In article <n4gqo41g6oq81r7j8cpjdrbk3365m5oleg@xxxxxxx>,
Susan S <otoeremovethis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In talk.origins I read this message from John McKendry
<jlastname@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

On Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:04:27 +0000, Susan S wrote:

Any historical linguists here?

Susan Silberstein

I took a few courses and still have the books, although I'm
afraid some of them are in storage and may be hard to get to.
Mostly Indo-European, but at least one book on Semitic. This
is why I hate to put books away. You finally decide that
nobody's going to ask you about Grassman's Law in the foreseeable
future, and as soon as you've packed up the box and trundled it
across town to the storage facility and hidden it under twenty
identical boxes, sure as the world somebody is going to post
a question about historical linguistics to your favorite
newsgoup. But I digress.

I sense that a number of us would at least like to know what
your question is. And whatever it is, Ray's answer is sure to
provide some entertainment.

There are still real linguists posting to sci.lang, although
the group is plagued by spammers, flamers, and fools and the
signal to noise ratio is pretty low. The serious guys would
probably love to see a real on-topic question there.

Someone brought up the origin of the word orange. Not the fruit, we know
about that, just the word. In English, it comes from Arabic, then Old
French to Med. English. So, we were wondering, what word did English
speakers use prior to that? Was there one word used or maybe two words
such as "red yellow" or some such?

I suppose it is even possible that orange was not recognized as a
separate color with its own word.

Susan Silberstein

The structure of this thread is coming across strangely on my
newsserver, so I'm not sure why this issue is coming up.

The word given previously in this thread ('geoluhread') would fail to
constitute a basic colour term by B&Ks criteria since it is not
monomorphemic.

With respect to whether it was viewed as a 'separate colour', I'm not
entirely sure what is meant by this, so to put this into perspective its
probably worth considering what is really meant by claiming that one
language has more or less *basic* colour terms than another.

Modern English has between eight and eleven basic colour terms (black,
white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, and grey satisfy all eight of
B&K's criteria, orange fails on one, pink and purple arguably fail
several).

The only languages which I'm aware of off-hand which have more basic
terms than English are some slavic languages which distinguish between
light and dark blue. Note that the important fact about the slavic
languages is not simply that they have monomorphemic words for these two
types of blue, but that there is no native "umbrella" term which
subsumes both of these.

Many language have fewer basic colour terms. For example, classical
Mayan made a three-way distinction between "black" (iq), "white" (sak),
and "red" (tsax).

One could argue these should be translated as 'dark', 'pale', and
'bright', since "black" also subsumed the darker shades of blue, green,
and red; "white" also subsumed lighter shades of blue, green, pink, and
yellow, and "red" subsumed most greens and yellows. The reason for
assigning these terms the labels 'white', black, and 'red' stems from
the fact that these constitute the most prototypical instances of the
colours named (this being based on how the terms are used in Modern
Mayan languages, though working things out is complicated by the fact
that Mayan had developed two additional basic prior to Spanish contact,
and most Mayan languages have subsequently incorporated a variety of
Spanish colour terms which are, by now, largely nativised).

Important to note here, though, is that the classical Maya had a full
range of terms for describing all of the colours used by normal (i.e.
non-interior decorator/cosmetician) English speakers; it's just that
these additional terms failed to qualify as "basic" using the B&K
criteria.

Does this, though, entail, entail that they wouldn't view red and green
as 'separate', but merely as two different shades of _tsax_? My
assumption would be no since they way in which we divide up the spectrum
is a consequence of the number of distinct cones we possess in our
retinas and AFAIK the incidence of red-green colour blindness among the
Maya is no different from other populations.

The only work I'm aware of off-hand which might have some bearing on
this is that of MacLaury (e.g. Language 67, pp34-62), where colour
discrimination among Mayans speaking more conservative (i.e. those
retaining a smaller number of basic terms) and less conservative Mayan
languages was compared. I don't have his papers handy, but as I recall
what he found was that there was some difference among different groups
in terms of what they *reported*, but it didn't correlate with the
number of basic terms in their language. Rather, those groups who had
had a greater amount of interaction (negative interaction, in
particular) with Spanish (which has a greater number of basic colour
terms) exhibited *poorer* discrimination than those who had less contact
with the Spanish. This was interpreted essentially as resistance
(conscious or otherwise) to the use of Spanish borrowings among those
groups who felt culturally threatened by the Spanish rather than any
actual difference in colour discrimination/classification.

Now, obviously, we don't have any Anglo-Saxon speakers around to subject
to testing, but my guess would be that 'gieluread' would have had pretty
much the same status as "greenish-yellow" in Modern English. Is
greenish-yellow (a) green, (b) yellow, (c) both, or (d) neither? To
qualify as Basic according to B&K you'd have to answer (d) (ignoring all
other criteria) -- is that what you mean by "separate"?

Andre

[full disclosure: I am decidedly not a Whorfian. I think Whorf made some
very significant contributions to American linguistics and was a very
bright guy, but was also in many respects somewhat crazy).

.

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