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Colour Studies: A broad spectrum
Edited by Wendy Anderson, Carole P. Biggam, Carole Hough and Christian Kay
[Not in series 191] 2014
► pp. 3–28

Prehistoric colour semantics

A contradiction in terms

Although prehistory is, by definition, a time before written records, or from which no written records survive, and is also, of course, a time for which no native speakers are available, it is the contention of this chapter that a certain amount of information can, nevertheless, be gleaned about colour semantics. The chapter is primarily concerned with the earliest basic colour categories (BCCs) of the Indo-European languages, and the approach taken is to combine various techniques from more than one discipline and to see whether the results corroborate or contradict each other. Linguistic approaches include etymology, core concepts, the UE model, cognates and prototypes while supporting evidence is brought to bear from archaeology, anthropology, art history and the earliest Indo-European texts in Hittite and Vedic Sanskrit.

Published online: 26 November 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.191.01big
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Alexander, Marc & Christian Kay
2014. The spread of RED in the Historical Thesaurus of English. In Colour Studies, ► pp. 126 ff. DOI logo
Uberman, Agnieszka
2023. COLOUR NAMING: SEMANTICS OF THE COLOUR WHITE IN ENGLISH AND POLISH LEXICON. Lege artis. Language yesterday, today, tomorrow ► pp. 147 ff. DOI logo
Změlík, Richard
2018. Transformation of the Linguistic Reasoning Paradigm of Basic Colour Terms: outline of the problem. Bohemica Olomucensia 10:2 ► pp. 24 ff. DOI logo

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