Basic BLUE in East Slavonic

Abstract

Russian's second BLUE term goluboj 'light blue' constitutes a well-known exception to the Berlin and Kay basic color-term typology. If other Slavonic languages do not have a second BLUE term, then the special position of Russian requires explanation; if there is evidence pointing to two basic terms for BLUE, we have a second set of data for investigating the evolution of this unusual color system. The languages genetically closest to Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian, are examined. Findings of the list task, a simple and elegant test for psychological salience of color terms, provide strong evidence that Ukrainian and Belarusian have also evolved a second BLUE. What is interesting is that the term is not the general East Slavonic term that Russian uses, but a Polish borrowing: blakytnyj 'light blue' (Ukrainian), blakitny 'light blue' (Belarusian). This opens up the possibility that a category, in this case the second BLUE, may be borrowed separately from the basic term that denotes it. Since the category has been borrowed separately from its term, we have evidence of a different kind that the Russian color system includes a second BLUE: the category is salient enough to be borrowed separately from the term that denotes it.

The colour lexicon of the Serbian language - a study of dark blue and dark red colour categories Part 1: Colour-term elicitation task

“…We were particularly interested in the saliency and status of two Serbian monolexemic terms that are used to describe dark blue shades -teget and dark red shades -bordo. As demonstrated in previous studies (Hippisley, 2001;Özgen & Davies, 1998;Paramei, 2005), the BLUE area of colour space is particularly prone to segregation into two BCTs. Similarly, terms denoting dark red shades (maroon, bordó, bordovyj) have shown significant cognitive saliency in several languages (Hippisley, 2001;Lindsey & Brown, 2014;Uusküla, Hollman, & Sutrop, 2012).…”

“…The basic status of the two blue categories in Russian have been demonstrated both in studies that used linguistic measures, like frequencies in texts (Corbett & Morgan, 1988) and behavioural measures, like colour naming and colour-term elicitation tasks (Davies & Corbett, 1994;Moss, 1989). Similar partition of the BLUE colour region into two salient colour terms exists in other East Slavic languages -Ukrainian and Belarusian (Hippisley, 2001). There are also studies showing that ghalazio 'light blue' is the 12 th BCT in modern Greek language (Androulaki et al, 2006), while lacivert 'dark blue" is 12 th BCT in the Turkish language (Özgen & Davies, 1998).…”

From Listing Data to Semantic Maps: Cross-Linguistic Commonalities in Cognitive Representation of Colour

“…However, the tables of n i and mr i that have been published for a number of languages (e.g. Davies & Corbett 1994a, 1994bDavies & Corbett & Margalef 1995;Hippisley 2001) are not sufficient for calculating S(i).…”

“…Both indicators of salience have been published in a number of studies of a variety of languages (e.g. Davies & Corbett 1994a, 1994bDavies & Corbett & Margalef 1995;Hippisley 2001). Urmas Sutrop (2001) combined them in the Cognitive Salience Index, CSI(i) = n i / N / mr i .…”

The basic colour terms of Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian and their typological relevance

“…As an additional point of interest we briefly consider the status of BLUE in these languages, as at least three other Slavonic languages are claimed to have two basic BLUE terms. Using the elicitation tasks outlined here, Corbett and Davies and collaborators have produced evidence in a number of papers that Russian goluboj 'light blue' is basic, alongside sinij 'dark blue' (Corbett and Morgan 1988;Davies and Corbett 1994), and in a later paper Hippisley (2001) evidence against a second term for BLUE comes in the distribution of terms specifically meaning 'dark blue' and 'light blue', and the term meaning 'blue', without a lightness distinction. For both languages, terms were offered with the glosses 'dark blue' and 'light blue': in Lower Sorbian śamnomodry and swĕtłomodry respectively, and Upper Sorbian ćmowomódry and swĕtłomódry.…”