4 Representasi Warna Dalam Bahasa Dan Budaya
4 Representasi Warna Dalam Bahasa Dan Budaya
Laelah Azizah
Universitas Negeri Makassar (UNM)
laelahs@yahoo.com
ABSTRACT
Different cultures have different terms for colors, and may also assign some color names to slightly different
parts of the spectrum: for instance, the Chinese character (rendered as qīng in Mandarin and ao in Japanese)
has a meaning that covers both blue and green; Similarly, languages are selective when deciding which hues
are split into different colors on the basis of how light or dark they are. A Russian will make the same red-pink
and orange-brown distinctions, but will also make a further distinction between sinii and goluboi, which English
speakers would simply call dark and light blue. However, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, in a classic 1969 study of
world wide color naming have argued that these differences can be organized into a coherent hierarchy, and that
there are a limited number of universal "basic color terms" which begin to be used by individual cultures in a
relatively fixed order. Their analysis a comparison of color words in 20 languages from around the world. Their
analysis showed that, in a culture with only two terms, the two terms would mean roughly 'dark' (covering black,
dark colors and cold colors such as blue) and 'bright' (covering white, light colors and warm colors such as red).
All languages with three colors terms would add red to this distinction. Additional color terms added in a fixed
order: green and/or yellow; blue; brown; and orange, pink, purple and/or gray. All languages with six color terms
use "black", "white", "red", "green", "blue" and "yellow", which roughly correspond to the sensitivities of the retinal
ganglion cells, leading Berlin and Kay to argue that color naming is not merely a cultural phenomenon, but is one
that is also constrained by biology,