color terms

[Raffaele Simone]

Italian has plenty of nouns (or noun phrases) indicating colours, that syntactically behave as adjectives as for position and function. They include:

viola "violet"
panna "cream"
arancio "orange yellow"
ghiaccio "ice, a kind of white-grey"
marrone "brown"
carta da zucchero "a kind of blue"
testa di moro "a kind of brown"

etc.

In the people's use some of the above items are now regularly pluralized (eg, marroni), but cultivated people feel such an use as incorrect and vulgar.
Best,

R Simone
University Roma Tre
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20060405/6d914e48/attachment.htm>