Lexical implementation peculiarities of the blue colour in the names of plants and mushrooms in the South Slavic dialects

Abstract

The basic colour term for blue is extremely rare in the plant nomination in comparison with the widespread derivatives of the other colour terms as “white”, “black”, “red” or even “yellow”. One can fi nd a few examples of such names recorded in the dictionaries of the Balkan Slavic dialects. Within the framework of this study, the material of the colour terms in the names of mushrooms was also taken into account, as mushrooms are supposed to be close to plants in the naive picture of the world. The “blue” can appear diff erently depending on the object of nomination: in the names of fl owers and fruits, the blue is recorded mainly in competing forms of the roots +модарand +син, and in the mushroom names there are forms of the roots +модар, +виолет-, as well as +плав — which is characteristic for the dialect continuum of the Serbian language. When analyzing the total corpus of lexemes one can notice an obvious pre-dominance of the element +модар in comparison with the basic and most common at this period lexemes of Bulg., Mac., Serb. синand плав. The root +модар is used in the meaning of the border colour between blue and purple. Therefore, it corresponds better to the nomination of plant and mushroom, whose colours can vary in shades and in intensity.