engleski

Expressing ‘pink’ (ros-) from Ancient to Early Modern Latin. A corpus-based study

A great deal of research has been devoted to naming colours in Ancient Latin (e.g. André 1949, Kristol 1980, Baran 1983, Eco 1985, Lyons 1999, Kay 1999, Oniga 2007, Bradley 2009). Sets of Basic Colour Terms (BCT) have been proposed and associations of colour terms with real-life objects outlined. The investigations of the later periods are scarcer and focussed on cultural implications rather than on linguistic questions. Furthermore, they hardly separate discussions of Latin from those of other languages. While in the modern world hue is generally accepted to be the central quality of distinguishing between colours, in the Classical Antiquity brightness was more prominent (Gage 1993: 24-28). The Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period brought about some crucial changes. At a global level, scientific, cultural and technological developments caused the BCTs to align along the hue distinction. Furthermore, they emancipated from their attachment to concrete objects, increasingly referring to abstract colour notions (Bradley 2009: 222-223). Latin, on the other hand, lost all its native speakers and began to be used by people with various linguistic backgrounds, who had a variety of colour terms in their respective mother tongues at their disposal. Our main research question will be: how were the terms for the hue space of 'pink' (lexically derived from rosa) used in a large time span from the beginning of the Latin literature through the Early Modern Period. We will explore how their use fits into the universalistic theoretical model of Belin and Kay (1969), which predicts gradual establishment of basic colour terms, with pink coming at the stage VII (the last one, together with purple, orange, and grey ; see also Oniga 2007). Additionally, we will observe whether the corpus data support the opposing relativistic view, according to which the change of cultural context has a crucial role in the development of the BCTs (e.g. Eco 1985, Lyons 1999: 65). Departing from the existing lexicographical descriptions of the researched terms, the analysis will be performed on a custom 35 million word corpus of Latin texts from all periods, both literary and technical, containing almost the entire Ancient Latin literature (11.5 million words), with the addition of medieval (9 million words) and early modern (14.5 million words) texts. A systematic corpus inquiry of lexical associations will help us avoid a trap of forcing Latin colour terms into our modern categories. Both neologisms and semantic shifts will be taken into account. The study will reveal whether and when roseus (along with its derivatives) started to occupy a BCT slot in Latin or to be specialised for a certain part of abstract colour spectre, which objects it used to describe, how prominent was its use for an abstract notion of 'pink', how frequently it was used chromatically or figuratively, what emotional and symbolical meanings were linked to it, and how it was distributed across the text types.

Latin language, colour vocabulary, basic colour terms

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