THE BASIC COLOUR TERMS OF CZECH

Abstract

1. Introduction After Berlin and Kay published their famous and much discussed study Basic colour terms: Their Universality and Evolution the colour terms of Czech language have been served as a topic of interest mainly from three different points: 1) whether there are two (Cervena and ruda ) or only (Cervena) basic colour term for red; 2) whether there is a (basic) colour word meaning both 'blue' and 'yellow'; 3) how many basic colour terms are found in Czech language. Czech colour names Cervena 'red' and ruda 'red' have attracted particular interest in Czech colour studies, because it has been considered an original phenomenon. It has been stated that they might both be basic colour terms (Scmiedtova and Scmiedtova 2006, Nagel 2000). The study of Scmiedtova and Scmiedtova is based on Czech National Corpus. In fact, two colour names for red, piros 'red' and voros 'red' are also found in the Hungarian language. Berlin and Kay suggested in their monograph that both of them are basic colour terms (1969:95). This statement has lived a long life and only lately it has been found out that piros 'red' is indeed a basic term, while voros 'red' is not (Bogatkin-Uuskula and Sutrop 2005a, 2005b, MacLaury et al. 1997, Uuskula and Sutrop 2007). Lebedeva has studied colour terms Cervena 'red' and ruda 'red' comparing them with Russian colour name krasnyj 'red' (19801981). This study does not aim to identify the basic colour terms of Czech, but to bring forth the meaning differences of Cervena 'red' and ruda 'red'. In addition, some good examples of collocations with Cervena 'red' and ruda 'red' are also presented (Lebedeva 19801981:442). A short discussion about other Czech colour name, plavy 'bright, blond' emerged in 1972. McNeill proposed that the Czech language categorise blue and yellow together in colour name (McNeill 1972:30). He also argued that other contemporary Slavonic languages share this feature, a fact that we should consider very carefully. According to this paper, Van Brakel has installed this example amongst the anomalies that differ from the Berlin and Kay theory under the title one word including a pair of opponent 'primaries' in its extension (Van Brakel 1994:773). Although the word plavy 'bright, blond' also exists in contemporary Czech, its use is restricted to a narrow class of objects and it does not seem to be a common name either for blue or for yellow. Many scholars have tried to identify the basic colour terms in Czech using different methods or expert opinions (see for example Nagel 2000, Pawlowski 1999, Scmiedtova and Scmiedtova 2002, 2006). David Short has proposed an expert opinion that Czech possesses 11 basic colour terms. He also suggests that the second colour term for red, ruda is used only in political context (1993:526). To date, Czech colour terms have not been investigated with empirical field methods. The original method of Berlin and Kay is complicated and time-consuming when used on a large number of subjects (Berlin and Kay 1969:57). Ian Davies and Greville Corbett have proposed a new field method based on Berlin and Kay's original procedure (Davies and Corbett 1994, 1995), which is used in this study. The field method makes the interviews easier to conduct and limits them to approximately 2040 minutes each, depending on language. Many European languages, like Russian (Davies and Corbett 1994), English (Davies and Corbett 1995), Estonian (Sutrop 2000a, 2000b, 2001, 2002), Hungarian (BogatkinUuskula and Sutrop 2005a, Uuskula and Sutrop 2007), Turkish (Ozgen and Davies 1998), and Catalan (Davies et al. 1995) as well as many exotic languages (e.g. Davies et al. 1992, Davies et al. 1994) have been studied with this field method. The present study was carried out to establish the basic colour terms in Czech with particular interest in whether there are 11 basic colour terms or exceptionally 12 basic colour terms, with an addition of the other colour term for red, ruda. …