Mõnest värvinimetusest ja nende tähendusvahekordadest eesti ja soome keeles
On some colour terms and their semantic relationships in Estonian and Finnish

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the terms for hues from purple to pink used in spoken Estonian and spoken Finnish. Most of the dialectal material illustrates the usage of the first half of the 20th century, while the results of the field work conducted in the 1990s and 2005–2006 are treated as indicative of the modern state of the art. In Estonian as well as in Finnish, both purple and pink have been referred to by words for the main hue (blue or red) or by their combinations, or by comparison-based compound terms. Beside those there are a number of borrowed terms with Indo-European stems, such as lilla, violett, maliina, aniliin, purpur, kretliini, roosa and pinkki. With the help of the native speakers, the part of the spectrum area or concrete hue referred to by this or that term has now been specified. It turns out that the use of the terms borrowed from Indo-European languages differs, on the one hand, from that of the donor language and, on the other hand, across the languages/dialects spoken in the Finnic area. In addition, our lexical comparison revealed the changes in reference to the colour concepts in question over the past century. Among else, there is a clear tendency towards an increasing preference of borrowed terms.

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