nahuatl colors

[Michael McCafferty]

Here are the coordinates for the Hill's paper on PUA colors:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029256?cookieSet=1


Michael



Quoting Magnus Pharao Hansen <magnuspharao at gmail.com>:

> Ken otimosemilwitiwak, Dr. Sullivan
>
> It is true that that is how Nahuatl is. The interesting thing is that
> Nahuatl has apparently jettisoned most of the color vocabulary of
> proto-Uto-Aztecan to become that way (If I am not mistaken the only Nahuatl
> colour word that has a UA cognate is *ista*- which is cognate with PUA
> *tosa), and furthermore that that is a very uncommon way for languages to be
> cross linguistically. Kay and Berlins study shows that it is by far the most
> common in the worlds languages to have terms that are exclusive for color.
>
> Thanks for giving me the yellow corn word - I have always been wondering
> whether there wasn't such a word out there - in a way its very beautiful
> that nahuatl color terms are derived from food products in this way -
> Hueyapan also has ya:wik "color of blue maize (ya:witl)".
>
> Magnus
>
>
> 2009/11/11 John Sullivan, Ph.D. <idiez at me.com>
>
> Piyali Magnus,
>> But isn?t that just the way Nahuatl is? How do you describe something in
>> Nahuatl? You say that it?s semblance is the result of having completed a
>> certain action, i.e., chip:hua>chipa:huac or tetiya>tetic. And this last one
>> is just an excuse for saying that it resembles some other noun. So there
>> really aren?t any adjectival roots in Nahuatl, except for maybe hueyi.
>>  "co:z-" isn?t just for color. [first of all I need to remark that in
>> Huastecan Nahuatl co:ztic has a long "o"]. "co:ztzin" is a type of corn, so
>> co:ztic just means that something has come to resembled that kind of corn
>> (in it?s yellowness). And yes, there is the intermediate form co:ztiya, "for
>> something to yellow".
>>  "co:cihui" means that a fruit is ripening and turning yellow
>> (co:z[tli]-ihui).
>> John
>>
>> John Sullivan, Ph.D.
>> Professor of Nahua language and culture
>> Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas
>>
>




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