AW: [SEELANGS] color orange

FIEGUTH Rolf rolf.fieguth at UNIFR.CH
Sun Sep 12 10:13:57 UTC 2010


Dear William,

what does Bakhalina say about "apelsinnyj tsvet" in the sense of colour? I found it in Ilf and Petrov's 12 stul'ev.
Best wishes,

Rolf Fieguth
________________________________________
Von: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] im Auftrag von William Ryan [wfr at SAS.AC.UK]
Gesendet: Sonntag, 12. September 2010 03:08
An: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Betreff: Re: [SEELANGS] color orange

  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
>
>
>
>
>
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