Synonymy in the language of colour

Mylonas, Dimitris, Koliousis, Alexandros and Usküla, Mari (2021) Synonymy in the language of colour. In: AIC 14th Congress.

Abstract

We explore synonyms in colour naming within and across three languages, British English, Estonian and Greek, using data collected from a crowdsourcing experiment. We identified 30 common lexical colour categories in British English, 41 in Estonian and 29 in Greek, where no one category was fully contained within others. The synonymy analysis within languages revealed that the highest degree of overlapness was found for a pair of dark reddish loanwords in English (maroon and burgundy) and in Greek (bissini and bornto) that were absent in Estonian. The synonymy of two purplish categories in Estonian (lilla and tumelilla) and Greek (mov and lila) was also prominent but in English purple and lilac were more separated. The investigation of synonymy across languages revealed similar graph properties for all pairs of languages (British English-Estonian; Estonian-Greek; Greek-British English). Our results suggest that the degree of synonymy in the language of colour is influenced by cross-cultural transfer of loan words.

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Official URL:	https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354380806...
Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Disciplines:	Computing, Maths, Engineering and Natural Sciences > Computing and Information Systems Computing, Maths, Engineering and Natural Sciences > Data Science & AI Humanities > English Humanities > Philosophy
Depositing User:	Dimitris Mylonas
Date Deposited:	05 Oct 2023 12:56
Last Modified:	12 May 2025 13:29
URI:	https://nul.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/268

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