The Spectrum of Red Colour Names in Portuguese

• Autor(a) principal: Silvestre, João Paulo
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Outros Autores: Villalva, Alina, Pacheco, Paulo
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/31015

Colour names behave quite differently in different languages. In fact, each language, or language group, sets its own colour naming system. Romance languages (along with some Germanic languages) inherited the central name for red from an Indo-European root h1reudh (see ruber / rubeus (Latin) and rosso (Italian), rouge (French), rojo (Spanish), roig (Catalan), red (English), rot (German), rood (Dutch) or rød (Danish)). The cognate noun both in Galician and in Portuguese (i.e. roxo), even though it may have been used as a name for red, it is now the colour name that can be translated into English by the noun purple. These two eastern peripheral romance languages, along with Catalan, favoured the Latin noun vermiculus (cf. vermello (Galician), vermelho (Portuguese) and vermell (Catalan)) as the unmarked designation for red. Counter wise, it is also possible to find cognate words in the above-mentioned first set of languages, but these words refer less central red hues (cf. vermiglione (Italian), bermejo (Spanish), vermilion (English), vermiljoen (Dutch), vermilion (Danish)) or even a non-colour term, like the French vermeil. In this paper, we discuss the variation that the spectrum of red colour names exhibits in a small set of languages, somehow related to Portuguese, which is set at the centre stage. This discussion takes their etymological relationships, their chronological nexus and their contemporary reinterpretations in numeric encodings, such as RGB or CMY into consideration. The analysis of these data allows inferring that the large array of colour and hues, shades and tints, as described, for instance by the Munsell colour system, has no linguistic equivalence: colour names reflect a limited amount of colour distinctions, fulfilled by an unstable set of nouns.Colour names change within and across languages, they frequently change in time and their meaning also often changes. Probably, all this instability is set for independent linguistic reasons, related to the effects of language contact situations and to strict lexical principles, such as economy. Portuguese will again be invoked to demonstrate that derived or compound names used to refer to those chromatic narrow distinctions may keep their stylistic or literary pertinence, but are unable to maintain any unambiguous meaning.