Silky entanglements in Chinese color‐naming and its diachronic change: A new materialism perspective

Abstract

This work seeks to explore the silk-shaped Chinese color lexicon from the Bronze Age to the present, drawing upon a new materialism perspective that recognizes the force of matter and challenges the privileged position of humans in the historical progress. Rejecting the dichotomy of material and immaterial-established by structuralism and empiricism-this approach explores the complex interactions between language, matter (silk), environment, climate, social transformation, ideology, and culture by assessing Chinese color-naming and its semantic changes. The article traced the diachronic changes of 13 terms and found that the materiality of silk and its color attribute was generally entangled in one character in the Bronze Age, conforming with the object-attribute entangled word-creation habits and general cognitive patterns in Chinese. The natural environment and economic transformation led to the predominance of silk-color entangled terms than other object-color entangled terms to denote colors. The strict association between identity and color in the hierarchical ideology caused improvements in dyeing techniques, which enhanced human color cognition and expanded the silk-color entangled lexicon. After the fourth century AD, the introduction of cotton reduced the social and cultural influence of silk. This, along with the internal adjustment in the language system, reduced the significance of silk in the semantics of silk-color entangled terms. It is believed that silk-color entangled terms may go through six stages or stop at any of them: from silk-color entanglement to silk-color differentiation, and then to the shedding of silk meaning. According to the stages that they have went through, silk-color entangled terms and object-color entangled terms are classified into three types: semantic color terms, pragmatic color terms, and occasional pragmatic color terms. This study indicates that the current color lexicon was co-shaped due to the interaction and dynamic assemblage of multiple material and non-material factors.