TRAMES 1, 4, 2000

THE BASIC COLOUR TERMS OF ESTONIAN

Urmas Sutrop

Universität Konstanz

Abstract. There are exactly 11 basic colour terms in Estonian: valge 'white', must 'black', punane 'red', kollane 'yellow', roheline 'green', sinine 'blue', pruun 'brown', hall 'grey', roosa 'pink', lilla 'purple', and oranþ 'orange'. This corresponds to the fully developed Berlin and Kay's Stage VII colour system. Estonian encodes the basic colour terms in the universal way predicted by the theory of Berlin and Kay.

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