color orange

[William Ryan]

  This rather surreal set of possible word combinations certainly pushes 
up the potential word count for "oranzhevyi" (though the absence of 
fruit in the list certainly reinforces my memory of the 1960s), but I 
was thinking in more historical terms, i.e. if "oranzhevyi" is not 
attested in Russian before the 1860's (says Chernykh's etymological 
dictionary), what word did Russians use for this colour before?

I can now partly answer my own question - chapter four of the admirable 
work by N.B. Bakhalina, Istoriia tsvetooboznacheniia v russkom iazyke, 
Moscow, 1975, is devoted entirely to words for the colour orange shows 
that the word is indeed used in the colour sense only from the later 
19th century. Before that "oranzhevyi" existed only in the botanical 
sense - "oranzhevoe derevo".  Bakhalina, who covers Old Russian and 
Modern Russian in her book, with a wealth of examples, discusses words  
from the angle of both colour perception and language history. She 
concludes that the commonest word for orange before "oranzhevyi" was 
"rudozheltyi", which was new to me, but that several other words such as 
"zharkoi" and "ognennyi" were also used (which is good to know since it 
would be easy to mistranslate them). An internet search revealed that 
Kantemir in the earlier 18th c. in his Ode in Praise of Science 
translated the orange of Newton's spectrum as "rudozheltyi".

However, a search for "rudozheltyi" gave almost no results for 19th 
century literature, so if writers before the 1860s were not using either 
oranzhevyi or rudozheltyi, what were they using? Or is the searchable 
database not yet big enough to do a meaningful search?

Will

On 10/09/2010 21:57, Alina Israeli wrote:
> Sep 8, 2010, в 6:12 AM, William Ryan написал(а):
>
>>
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> About at the same time you were in Leningrad, Arkanov and Gorin wrote 
> this song
>
> Оранжевая песня
>
> (Написана вместе с Гр. Гориным в 1964 г.)
>
> Вот уже подряд два дня
> Я сижу — рисую.
> Красок много у меня —
> Выбирай любую.
> Я раскрашу целый свет
> В самый свой любимый цвет.
>
>     Оранжевое небо,
>     Оранжевое море,
>     Оранжевая зелень,
>     Оранжевый верблюд.
>     Оранжевые мамы
>     Оранжевым ребятам
>     Оранжевые песни
>     Оранжево поют.
> http://ironicpoetry.ru/autors/arkanov-arkadiy/oranzhevaya-pesnya.html
>
> Music by Pevzner.
>
> Listen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqwJvPSiL_I
>
> It was wildly popular those days. And still is.
>
>
>
> Alina Israeli
> Associate Professor of Russian
> LFS, American University
> 4400 Massachusetts Ave.
> Washington DC 20016
> (202) 885-2387     fax (202) 885-1076
> aisrael at american.edu
>
>
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
>  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
> http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------