Factitive verbs of colour

[alice]

In English "whiten", "blacken", and "redden" are the only factive verbs derived directly from colours. It just so happens that these are also the first three colours in the Berlin and Kay system, which leads me to ask: in other languages which have these, is there a similar implicational hierarchy, i.e.you can't have a word for "make brown" without already having one for "make green"?

[Darren]

English also has "pinken" and "greyen" (or simply "grey" as a verb) without derived *greenen or *yellowen, and according to Wiktionary "bluen" and "blonden". Having said this, only "whiten" and "blacken" go back to Middle English. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the exceptions were related to body terms (e.g. greyen of hair, pinken of blushing/being cold).

Then "greenify," "whitify," "brownify" are all neologisms.

[Estav]

“Bluen” aside, “blue” is also used as a verb. It is less frequent than blacken, whiten, redden, but I don’t think the difference in morphology corresponds to a difference in syntax. There is a hypothesis that the suffix -en only attaches to obstruent-final monosyllabic bases, although the exceptions make me a bit skeptical.

[Pabappa]

Surely green is a verb?

[Estav]

Yes; and I think yellow (v) is even more common than blue or green.

[Darren]

Yes; and I think yellow (v) is even more common than blue or green.

Yeah, that's one I'd use everyday along with blacken/whiten/redden/grey.

[linguistcat]

Brown is also a zero derivation verb.

[Darren]

English probably isn't the best example because every colour term apart from very specific ones (like "chartreuse" or "puce") have a verbal form, either zero-derivation or using -en. Of the major colour terms, all of them apart from "red" can also function as verbs in relatively standard speech.

[alice]

In case it wasn't clear, I was specifically asking about non-zero derivations,and if they're in any way correlated with Berlin and Kay's observations about colour terms.

[Curlyjimsam]

-en has various restrictions regarding the phonology of the base to which it attaches I think. I'm too tired to try and work out exactly what they are, but to a first approximation *greenen might be ruled out by final /n/, *bluen by a final vowel, *yellowen by having too many syllables etc. So that's a further complicating factor for English.

But as a cross-linguistic question this certainly looks very interesting!

[Darren]

I have found a paper which might be relevant - "Colour Verbs in English and Romanian" by Adina Camelia Bleotu. I haven't had time to read it, but it's available online (although the only link I can find auto-downloads it). It's the first result on a Google search.

Another article about a specific language - "Colour Verbs in Modern Greek: A Cognitive Approach" by Chariton Charitonidis, which is on ResearchGate.

[Kuchigakatai]

Here is a thread alice opened on the same topic of colour verbs two years ago (at the time he simply asked for inventories, not whether there is a hierarchy):

http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f ... r#p1135879

Inventories may be found there for Norwegian, French, Polish, German, Swedish, Welsh, Spanish, plus a brief discussion of Finnish.

[alice]

Here is a thread alice opened on the same topic of colour verbs two years ago (at the time he simply asked for inventories, not whether there is a hierarchy):

http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f ... r#p1135879

Inventories may be found there for Norwegian, French, Polish, German, Swedish, Welsh, Spanish, plus a brief discussion of Finnish.

Quoth Spinal Tap: "The more it stays the same, the less it changes". I'd completely forgotten about that

[Tropylium]

Finnish has a small set of verbs for 'to appear color X(ish)':
vihertää / green
sinertää (rarely sineltää) / blue
punertaa / red
kellertää / yellow
(rarely lilertää / purple)
but no equivalents for black or white, so clearly not in the Berlin–Kay hierarchy.

Verbs for 'to become color X' have a slightly wider range:
mustua / black
vihertyä / green
sinistyä / blue
punertua, punehtua, punastua / red
kellastua / yellow
rusehtua / brown
harmaantua / grey
with still no equivalent for white though. There is a verb valjeta which probably etymologically meant this, but today rather means 'to dawn, to become more lit; to be clarified, to dawn on someone'.

'To make color X' can be derived productively, in a few different ways even (oktariinintaa 'to make smth turn octarine', malvata 'to color with mauve', etc.).

[Linguoboy]

Irish, like Welsh, also has a nigh-complete set judging from lexical entries. However, it may be significant that all are formed with the addition of the common formative suffix -(a)igh with three exceptions: dearg "(bright) red", liath "grey", and geal "(bright) white". These three have identical adjectival and verbal stems, e.g. dearg "redden". (Cf. ruaigh "make or become reddish brown" < rua "reddish brown".) Liath and geal are both used of natural hair colour but dearg is not; all three can be used to describe someone's complexion.

The one basic colour term without a corresponding factive verb is uaine "bright green". Historically, this was reserved particularly for artificial shades of green and appears to be moribund in contemporary Irish.

[Kuchigakatai]

In the post from two years ago that I linked to, zompist wrote:

Spanish: just going off dictionaries (I will ask the native speaker when she gets home). It starts out pretty strong:

azul blue > azular(se); also azulear be bluish
rojo red > enrojecer(se)
blanco white - blanquear
negro black - negrear
amarillo yellow - amarillear
pardo brown > pardear
oscuro dark > oscurecer

Also note bronce (bronze) > broncear (bronze, also tan), oro (gold) > dorar, plata (silver) > platear (or argentar)

I can't find anything for rosado (pink), marron (chestnut brown), moreno (dark brown), púrpura (purple), gris (grey), morado (purple).

My wife gave some slightly different words: emblanquecer, ennegrecer, amarillar, plus amoratar (for morado).

I have never come across azular, azulear, negrear, amarillear, pardear, platear. I would furthermore say that in my dialect (Salvadoran Spanish) we don't actually have any colour verbs at all. The ones that seem to be so are actually idiomatic and limited to particular contexts.

My own inventory consists of:
* blanquear 'to whiten [cloth] with bleach'
* amarillarse '(of old white clothes) to turn yellow'
* oscurecerse '(impersonal verb, near the evening) to get dark'
* dorar '(in cooking) to fry sth till golden', dorarse '(in cooking) to get fried till golden'
* broncearse 'to tan, get a tan, get tanned'

(The -se pronoun is used meaningfully: blanquear is only used as a transitive, amarillarse/broncearse only as intransitives, and oscurecerse only as an impersonal for the sky.)

To these I would add the following words, which are well known and recognized from foreign Spanish but not used much in El Salvador unless under a literary affectation: sonrojar '(other Spanish) to make sb blush', sonrojarse '(other Spanish) to blush', enrojecerse '(other Spanish) to blush', empalidecerse '(other Spanish) to turn pale'.


The intransitive is generally replaced by ponerse (more emotional, unexpected and sudden) or volverse (more unemotional, expected and gradual): ponerse verde de la envidia 'to turn green out of envy'. When talking about a person or people wearing clothes and/or painting their face of a particular colour for an event, also ponerse de [color]: el estadio se puso de rojo y azul 'the stadium turned red and blue' (i.e. the fans who showed up were mostly in red and blue, the colour of a local soccer team).

For the transitive, an appropriate verb or a causative construction is used: pintar algo de azul 'to paint sth blue', hacer que se pongan amarillas 'make [them] turn yellow'.