Yellow or green? Distinguishing green and yellow colors in Albanian

Abstract

When studying the system of color terms in the Albanian language, one can notice that it significantly diff ers from the corresponding systems in the neighboring Balkan languages in a number of parameters. This article considers the basic color terms for ‘green’ and ‘yellow’ in the Albanian language, which clearly demonstrate how contacts of different nations in the Balkans could aff ect the color categories, in particular these two fragments of the Albanian system of color terms. During the Roman era, Latin borrowings entered the language and became the most common way of denoting these two colors. Turkish, being the language of the privileged population for many centuries, has also left deep traces in the lexical system of Albanian. The color terms of Proto-Albanian origin are marginal in the language compared to the borrowed ones. The present article discusses the diff erentiation of various expressions of diff erent origin for yellow and green in Albanian.