GPS directions, color schemes, and other linguistic universals

[William Ryan]

  Yes, an interesting article. It begins "Before I knew that school 
buses were yellow, I experienced them as tangerine." and mentions 
sinii/goluboi and Russian colour awareness.

This prompted me to some "Wort und Sache" reflections. As a child in a 
largish working-class family in WW2 I did not see an orange until well 
after the war, and tangerines, satsumas etc re-emerged into general use 
several years later, and then only as rather exotic Christmas treats. So 
I don't know how I learned to identify orange as a colour. Presumably by 
instruction but without any specific point of reference. And I still 
would not normally employ tangerine as a first-choice colour term, and 
think of it as a word more likely to be seen in a fashion magazine or 
list of paint shades. My memory of American school buses is that they 
are indeed yellow.

In the Russian context, as a student in Leningrad in the early sixties I 
never saw an orange or any other citrus fruit. I do in fact wonder if 
the word "oranzhevyi" is as common in Russian as "orange" (as a colour 
word) is in English. The etymological dictionaries suggest that 
"oranzhevyi" was a borrowing from French in the 1860s, while in English 
"orange" as a colour has been in use at least since the 16th century. In 
Russian the colour word does not have the mnemonic benefit of a 
corresponding fruit referent as the English does. And as far as I know 
"apel'sinovyi" is not commonly used as a colour word. So what did 
Russian use before they had "oranzhevyi" and is "oranzhevyi" a 
first-choice word now? A quick unscientific search on Google and Yandex 
suggests that "a yellow orange" is not a normal word combination in 
English while "zheltyi apel'sin" is quite possible in Russian. I imagine 
that "an orange orange" would be even less likely in English, since it 
is a jingle, while "oranzhevyi apel'sin" would be quite possible in Russian.

Will Ryan

On 07/09/2010 22:10, Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
> <http://www.thenation.com/article/154551/bluer-rather-pinker>
>
> Interesting musings by Ange Mlinko, with references to some recent 
> publications.
>

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