colour orange

[John Dunn]

Perhaps the Golden Age is so-called because the writers of that period did not feel the need to refer to anything that was orange-coloured.   More seriously, if they did, an adjective they might have used is померанцевый [pomerancevyj], defined in Dal' [III, col. 700] as: ранжевый [sic], рудожолтый, жаркой [ranzhevyj, rudozholtyj, zharkoj].  

It did occur to me that the absence of an etymological link between апельсин [apel'sin] and оранжевый [oranzhevyj] means that there is no necessary reason to define the colour in terms of the fruit, but, in fact, Dal', Ushakov and the 17-volume Dictionary all include the phrase цвета апельсина [cveta apel'sina] in their definition of оранжевый.

John Dunn.
_________
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of William Ryan [wfr at SAS.AC.UK]
Sent: 12 September 2010 03:08
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: 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

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