Bears and why they mostly are called otherwise
Ante Aikio
anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi
Thu Mar 9 09:37:16 UTC 2000
On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, Richard M. Alderson III wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Mar 2000, Ante Aikio (anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi) wrote:
>> There's a similar semantic shift in e.g. Finnish puna 'red color' < *'fur'
>> (its cognates mean 'hair', 'fur', 'wool').
> Is it the basic term for _red_ in Finnish? Or is there another, so that only
> certain things get labeled _puna_? (Cf. horse-hide terms in English such as
> _bay_, _dun_, _chestnut_, and so on.)
No, it's the only term for 'red' in Finnish. _puna_ is actually a noun
meaning 'red color', and the corresponding adjective is a derivative of it
(punainen 'red'). The meaning 'color' is also attested in some of the
other Uralic cognates, but not 'red'.
Ante Aikio
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