Color Terms (Re: Cherokee term for 'china clay')

[Rory M Larson]

Dave wrote:
> Biloxi seems to retain only one term for a bluish-green hue, I guess,
thohi.  But what I find interesting is that its close cousin Ofo has two
separate words for blue and green: ithohi for the former and itchohi for
the latter.  I'm not sure if this implies that Ofo innovated separate words
while Biloxi retained just the one, but that seems the most logical I
think?  It seems more logical for a language to develop differing words for
different colors to be more specific rather than two originally separate
color terms having been collapsed into one in Biloxi.

These two are originally just pronunciation variants of the same word,
aren't they?  This looks exactly like the 'Grandmother speech' usage that
John has described for Omaha, a 'baby talk' convention that is productive
of new words.  The rule is simply to change all dental/alveolar stops to
the corresponding palatal affricates to get a sort of diminutive.  So did
Biloxi and Ofo have this rule too?

For example, in Omaha, the basic word for 'good' is u'udaN.  In Dorsey, I
believe this word is also used for 'beautiful'.  But in modern Omaha, our
speakers have assured us that the word for 'beautiful' is u'udjaN, not
u'udaN.  We just learned the other day in Macy, however, that u'udaN can
actually be used in the 'good-looking' sense for young men: i.e.
'handsome'.  Girls are u'udjaN, 'pretty'.

I would understand the Ofo set described as:

  ithohi - grue (standard term)  'blue'

  itchohi - (cute widdle) gwue (the diminutive form)  'green'

The thohi term might be the only one recorded for Biloxi, but if this sort
of relationship was possible I think it would be hard to determine that
they didn't use tchohi as an alternate if they really wanted to specify
'green'.  We should also note that in the Ofo and Biloxi dictionaries,
'green' is not necessarily strictly a color term.  It may also stand for
'unripe'.

Rory