Color lexeme
Color lexemes are the basic semantic units used to denote colors ( black, white, red , etc.).
From a physical point of view, the spectrum of colors is continuous, but is linguistically broken down into discrete lexical morphemes , which makes the comparison of color elements in different languages particularly interesting for linguistics . The question that arises is whether the areas of the spectrum referred to by the respective lexemes are set arbitrarily, i.e. of a cultural nature, or universal, i.e. almost identical in all languages, which would speak for a physiologically determined lexical pattern.
In fact, in many languages one can find basic, i.e. not composed, color lexemes for which there is no exact counterpart in others. In Latin there are no lexemes for gray and brown , the Navajo has a common lexeme for blue and green , but two for black (related to darkness and dark objects), in Russian there is no blue , instead the two colors sinij (синий ) and goluboj (голубой) for dark blue and sky blue . In some languages there are very few color lexemes, for example in the highlands of New Guinea, where some peoples only differentiate between black and white .
Despite such overlaps, shifts and gaps, B. Berlin and P. Kay came to the conclusion in 1969, when examining the color systems of 98 languages, that a universal inventory of eleven basic color categories existed, which, depending on the language, either fully or partially exhausted, depending on the language becomes. They only counted terms as “basic” that are not composed, generally used, generally applicable and not contained in a different color. According to their research, languages that have lexemes for the colors listed below always also have the above colors. B. no language that knows blue , but not yellow or green . The range of color lexemes used in a language ranges from two, as in some Papuan languages, to eleven, as in German (or twelve in Russian).
The concept of Berlin and Kay is controversial and probably simplistic, but the study has nonetheless been able to demonstrate extensive cross-linguistic similarities in the use of color elements. The approximate correspondence of the first six color categories to the structure of the human retina ( rods for light-dark perception, cones for the colors red , green and blue ) and to the so-called primary colors is also striking .
See also
- Green and blue in different languages , among the peculiarities of these color names
literature
Crystal, David : The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Campus publishing house. Frankfurt / Main 1995. ISBN 3-88059-954-8
Földes, Csaba: Color names as phraseological structural components in German, Russian and Hungarian . In: EUROPHRAS 90th files of the international conference on German phraseology research Aske / Sweden 12. – 15. June 1990. Edited by Christine Palm. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia Germanistica Upsaliensia 32, Uppsala 1991. pp. 77-89.