Bears and why they mostly are called otherwise

[Dr. John E. McLaughlin]

[I (John McLaughlin) wrote]

>> "Orange" is not a basic color term in Modern English, since it is still
>> recognized as being the color of the fruit. ...  "Brown" is moving into this
>> class, but since we still have "bruin" in our language, it's not quite there
>> yet.  "Pink" is closer to being a basic term than "orange", since only
>> gardeners recognize "pink" as a name for a member of the genus Dianthus.

[Rich Alderson wrote]

> This is certainly a matter of dialect or idiolect:  For me, all three are
> basic in the B&K sense.  As a child, I learned that the fruit was called "an
> orange" because it *was* orange, I never associated "brown" with "bruin" (an
> adult learned term), and I had a pink shirt and necktie (with Davy Crockett
> on it) that was my favourite thing to wear when I was three.  Even as an
> occasional gardener, "pinks" are called that because they are...

This is, indeed, the tricky part of identifying basic color terms versus
non-basic terms.  When looking at the historic evidence, it is usually safer
to say that color terms are derived from other terms vastly more often than
the other way round.  (Although as I write this, I just heard a narrator on
the History Channel say, "...into the wild blue" and I also recall the basic
American terms of racial identification, "blacks" and "whites".)  As with
most language descriptions, we cannot rely on idiolects (unless, of course,
we're dealing with the "last speaker"), but must average things out.  On a
scale from most "colorified" to least, I would say that "pink" is the
farthest along ("pink" as a member of the genus Dianthus is a much older
usage than "pink" as a color), "brown" comes next (the "Bruins" of UCLA keep
that word alive), and "orange" is the least "colorified".  Ultimately, since
we're dealing with a diachronic process anyway, synchronic judgments of what
we learn first as a child, or what our level of familiarity with the
non-color word is, are irrelevant to the issue of what are the basic color
terms of Modern English.  If the source word is still extant in the
language, then the color term isn't basic yet.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)