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Weekly Vocab - Week 14 - Color Terms
I keep putting these up on Tuesdays. Bad Emma! Anyway, this week we're talking about color terms. Which ones do you have in your conlang? Which are basic and which are compound color terms?
Just for funesies: here's a very extensive list of (English) color terms by shade. Something you often hear about when discussing color terms is the Berlin and Kay study on their evolution which suggests a basic order in which color terms are added. I don't know how widely accepted it is, but it can be interesting to look at anyway.
I'm not sure I'll have time for conlanging this week so I don't have any specific goals for it, but I look forward to seeing everyone's contributions either way.
As usual, follow the post so you can circle back when the thread is added to!




It wouldn't really be a weekly vocab threat if I wasn't posting just before midnight on the Sunday, amirite? lol
I made up some colors. I just made these so I may well change my mind but so far I like them:
white/light - lin
black/dark - haw
red - kyr
yellow-green - mewlet
blue - ɛlaw
brown - a:mu
All in IPA. lin and haw are semantically wider than black and white and I think if you wanted to specify black or white more precisely, you'd probably use a compound with something like "completely" or "true". I wanted something in the color system that didn't mirror the standard in English etc, but I also wanted blue to be distinct because it's culturally important, hence the yellow-green color. /ɛlaw/ is probably related somehow to /yʍɛ:lam/, ocean. I'm a bit tempted to make /ɛlaw/ just mean "blue like the ocean" but I also want blue to be culturally significant with things that may not be ocean-blue so... I'm still not sure I wanna mix it in with yellow-green. I might make a separate word for non-ocean blue?
Also /a:mu/ might be the word for earth or at least mud as well.
These are, I think, just the noun versions of these words. I want to make some kind of ending to make it adjectival, roughly equivalent to -y in English. Well, I probably want more than one adjectival ending but I think the colors would use the same one.
Nice! And very pretty too! :D
Thank you!
I'm not too adventurous when it comes to colour words - they're definitely among the words where I'll feel like "I want to translate this/make a phrase like this in Conlang X" and so I'll make a word up that's close to the Swedish meaning.
So Beldreeni has primary words for black, white, red, green, blue, brown and gray, a compound for orange, and when it comes to pink it's probably a loanword or maybe originally the name of a flower, I don't know. For Nahul I haven't made up as many words yet, but I don't really have any specific ideas to do things differently. I guess I don't have a very chromatic imagination!
The word for 'black' in Siallé and Beldreeni shows some similarities, in that both start with K and feature back vowels: kaur and kōs. What more is, I remember now that I wanted something similar for Avari at first before choosing mel instead which had an Indo-European origin, and I was on the urge of picking something like that for Nahul as well before checking myself. Something about that K + back vowels just sounds very black to me!
Otherwise for Siallé and Avari I wanted words that really sounded like the colours they meant to me, whereas for Beldreeni I mostly tried to avoid doing that and actually went a bit the opposite way to some extent (though not with 'black'), much like with the languages in general.
This post reminds me that I should think up a word for 'ochre' in Beldreeni, because there's an order of fighting priests referred to as the Ochre school (though they're actually a sub-school of the Yellow or the Red school, I forget which for the moment).
I feel the same way about k+back vowel, both from Swedish kol and Arabic kuhli (the color of kohl, a sort of eye-makeup).
I love that you at least went through all the basic terms and that ochre is a thing! I have some mental sound associations of my own I have to constantly watch out for.
So currently existing color terms:
aeve • [ ai̯.vɛ ], [ av.e ] • pale green brown, from nu:saevie, a traditional tea with a pale hazel color
ibaen • red (brown) desert color, red brown rock desert
mulute • orange or yellow brown desert color, yellow sand and rock desert
batano:khe • earth and rock colors
batalakasid • liquid bright colors, e.g. the colors named for varieties of tea, an expression like jewel tones
sigete • [ si.gɛ.tɛ ] • a pale, yellowish gold color, from isiget, a yellow tea
sitale • [ si.tal.e ] • bright, deep green, from isital, the green tea made from young tea needles
vrige • [ vɹi.ge ] • a deep red color, like red wines or tea, from ivriges, a red tea
ikun • light blue color
No new ones yet. :(
I love how tea-related these are! <3 Particularly like the idea of "tea tones". It's also lovely that you have your own basic (I assume?) color terms and not using the same range as usual of just red, blue, yellow, green etc.
I don't really know if they're basics. I know the blue is differentiated, not that I know what the dark blue color is yet. I think the tea-terms technically don't count as basic, but bah. I don't care, they see a lot of use. There's a lot of (con)history in this language, so it's definitely starting from a point of having many, many color terms.
Ah, ok. Lovely either way! Even if they're not basic I think it still gives them a special vibe that they're not just constructed as "teatype-colored".
That was a good day for conlanging. :D I like when things come together like that and, well, I really, really love tea.
Me too. Tea's the best.
So lovely and poetical!!!
Thank you!