Tänapäeva ungari keele põhivärvinimed
The Basic Colour Terms in Modern Hungarian

Summary/Abstract: Berlin and Kay, in their highly influential work ”Basic Colour Terms: Their Universal- ity and Evolution” (1969), proposed that there are exceptionally 12 (instead of 11) basic colour terms in Hungarian. They argued that there are two basic terms — piros and vörös — for the red region. Present empirical study shows that there are exactly 11 basic colour terms in modern Hungarian. We conclude that in Hungarian only piros is a basic colour term and the second colour term for red vörös is not. Ranked by the cognitive salience index (Sutrop 2001) the basic colour terms are: piros ’red’, kék ’blue’, zöld ’green’, sárga ’yellow’, fehér ’white’, fekete ’black’, lila ’purple’, barna ’brown’, szürke ’grey’, rózsa- szín ’pink’ and narancssárga ’orange’. Hungarian language encodes the basic colour terms in the universal way.

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