Saturday, November 21, 2009

Colors

Colors are interesting... when I was taking beginning anthropology, we briefly touched upon the fact that different cultures perceive colors differently. So, even though you can translate a name, it may not be exactly the same color from one language to the other.

Here is a clip from the book Tamil Self Taught, which does not use the orthography. The first column is English, the second is the transliteration, and the third is a pronunciation guide.


So, now I am matching these up with the written Tamil I have record of in other places. In some cases the words match, in others, they seem wildly different.

2 comments:

chitra said...

Wow! I didn't even know some of these color names in Tamil!

Jenny said...

It is an older book, originally published in 1907... Here's the full text link:
http://books.google.com/books?id=9GNAAAAAYAAJ&dq=label%3A%22tamil%22&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

What words would you use for those colors?

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