Etymology Of Colours

[stonybonytony]

I think of colours in Thai as being 'colour of...'. This works very well with some of them - si fa, colour of sky, si nam tan colour of (brown) sugar, but less well as I go on. Si kao, colour of rice, but the tone is wrong for rice. Si keow, colour of a (green) snake (I've not seen a keow I'm guessing it's green). Si champoo, colour of a (pink) flower (again, I'm guessing, I don't know what a champoo flower looks like).

Then I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel - si deng, colour of being uncovered hence embarrassed and going red. Si luang, colour of holy people (some monks are Paw Luang and wear yellow robes). Si damm, colour of diving to the bottom of the sea?

I'm not sure what nam ngurn is - if it's liquid silver could this have a blue tinge?

Is this just a handy way of remembering colours based on the coincidence of si fa, or is this how the colour words came about?

[mangkorn]

Huh?

[meadish_sweetball]

I doubt that all colour words can be traced back to objects of that colour even if some can. I believe we have had a discussion of the origins of น้ำเงิน earlier, there might be some more info in there.

[Rikker]

There is an influential (but not universally accepted) linguistics book, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berlin and Kay, 1969), which looks at which "basic" color terms are found in a large sample of languages. (Basic here means, roughly, single-word terms--'pink' would be a basic color term, but 'light red' would not.)

The book defines a scale of evolution, from cultures that have only two basic color terms (black and white, or more accurately, light and dark), to those that have 11 or more basic color terms. Their scale is:

Stage I: Black and white

Stage II: Red

Stage III: Either green or yellow

Stage IV: Both green and yellow

Stage V: Blue

Stage VI: Brown

Stage VII: Purple, pink, orange or grey

Thai would be in the final stage, along with English. But notice that all the color terms which are fairly easily traced to real world objects are on the latter end of the scale: stages V through VII.

I think we can claim with some confidence that ฟ้า, น้ำเงิน, น้ำตาล, and ส้ม (and others like ทอง and เงิน) are color terms that come from real-world things. Probably also ม่วง (though I'm not sure what, if any, the connection with mango is), ชมพู (cognate with ชมพู่, from the color of the fruit/flower), and เทา (seems likely to be related to เถ้า 'ash').

Another approach is to look at which basic color words are shared by a significant number of languages across the geographic stretch of the language family (China, Vietnam, Burma, Laos, Thailand). This would indicate which terms are likely to be oldest, and less likely to be traceable to a real-world thing).

Sure enough, looking in William Gedney's Tai Language Sourcebook (ed. Hudak, 2008), all the color words through stage four are found in most of the languages sampled. Gedney surveyed 19 languages. The rundown for cognate color words:

Black: cognate with ดำ in 15 languages

White: cognate with ขาว in 16 languages

Red: cognate with แดง in 17 languages

Yellow: cognate with เหลือง in 14 languages

Green: cognate with เขียว in all 19 surveyed languages

There are also some widespread cognates of words that would later become color words in (Siamese) Thai, but the original meaning is clearly not the color. These include เงิน ('silver/money') and ส้ม ('sour', which would later become the fruit and then the color, but this sense is still seen in ส้มตำ and น้ำส้ม 'vinegar').

Disclaimer: I know very little about the specific etymology of any of these terms. My comments should be taken as broad observations, and not authoritative in any way.

Edited April 30, 2008 by Rikker

[meadish_sweetball]

Excellent and informative post as usual Rikker, thank you.

ส้ม ('sour', which would later become the fruit and then the color, but this sense is still seen in ส้มตำ and น้ำส้ม 'vinegar').

It is also the dialectal word for 'sour' used in kham mueang. Perhaps in other local dialects too?

Makes me wonder if เปรี้ยว perhaps might be a borrowing from somewhere.

[Rikker]

It is also the dialectal word for 'sour' used in kham mueang. Perhaps in other local dialects too?

Makes me wonder if เปรี้ยว perhaps might be a borrowing from somewhere.

Here's the full entry from Gedney's book:

0682 - sour, C1

SW - S som³ 'orange'; W sum³; B som³; Sh shom³; LNK som⁴; LCH, LMY sum³ 'sour; name of various fruits'; CM som⁵

CN - LP ɬom³; LM som³; WN sam³; LC ɬum³; PS, NM lom³

N - Y Өam³; Sk sam³; WM Өom³

Thai (first on the list, S for 'Siamese') is the odd man out with the meaning 'orange'.

(Anyone interested can refer to this blog post of mine for more info about the languages surveyed.)

Edited April 30, 2008 by Rikker

[Cuban]

I was going to add Orange and Pink - colors of fruit with those names.