Orð og tunga - 01.06.2013, Page 143

Susanne M. Arthur: Are Oranges Yellow?
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They nonetheless admit (Regier, Kay and Khetarpal 2007:1441) that
"linguistic convention may be one force that can pull a particular lan-
guage away from a perceptually optimal partitioning of color space"
and that the historical development of a language must be taken into
consideration. Both the history of the language and linguistic conven-
tion play an important role in Iceland. Icelandic grammar and lan-
guage purism favor the creation of new compound words rather than
the adaptation of monolexemic loanwords, which makes the mono-
lexemic criterion of basic color terms unsuitable for such a language
community.25 Berlin and Kay's monolexemic criterion can also be crit-
icized. While they consider orange to be a basic color term (fulfilling
the monolexemic criterion), they eliminate the examples "lemon-col-
ored" and "salmon-colored" for not being monolexemic (1969:5-6).
Since orange is, however, a shortening of orange-colored, its status as
a basic color term could conceivably be questioned as well.
Appelsínugulur fulfills Berlin and Kay's remaining three criteria.
According to the two scholars (1969:6), a basic color term must apply
to a wide range of objects. Appelsínugulur is used unrestrictedly to
denote orange-colored objects.26 Moreover, appelsínugulur fulfills the
fourth criterion as it is "psychologically salient for informants" (Ber-
lin and Kay 1969:6). It is the predominant term for orange. In fact, in
the Islensk-ensk orðabók (Sverrir Hólmarsson, Christopher Sanders and
John Tucker 1989) it is the only term listed for the color orange. Its
preferential status over other possible color terms is also supported
by the fact that two survey participants did not list any alternatives to
appelsínugulur. Additionally, in the survey, Icelanders almost always
uniformly used appelsínugulur (occasionally with the common pre-
fixes dökk- 'dark/ Ijós- 'light,' and skær- 'bright') for describing orange
objects. When asked to indicate which numbered color squares in a
color palette to be appelsínugulur (Icelandic) or orange (English), the
participants listed the exact same number range for both languages,
which reveals that all participants considered Icelandic appelsínugulur
and English orange as equivalent. A similar informal survey conduct-
ed by the author among native German-speakers, who use basic color
25 Jackson Crawford (2011) makes the same argument with regards to fjólublár 'pur-
ple.' See fn. 5.
26 Ásta Svavarsdóttir, editor of Orð og Tunga, brought to my attention that appelsínu-
gulur would, however, never be used for hair in the Modem Icelandic, for which
rauður is chosen. This is comparable to English, where a reddish color of hair is
generally referred to as rcd or ginger rather than orange.