01 September 2007

Miresua project of the month :: color revisions

This month I'll be posting revisions of some of my words for colors. These were among the first words I created in Miresua. In the past, I've usually deleted and re-added postings when I've changed words. But colors are important terms to me, and these changes involve bending my rules.

Finnish has four lengthy words for colors, with 7 to 9 letters, which end in the suffix "-nen". Finnish uses this suffix as a way to form adjectives. For my new revised words, I'm going to ignore the "–nen" suffixes on my Finnish source words. This will allow me to shorten my Miresua words.

There will be no words for the colors orange and pink in Miresua. Finnish and Basque have only in the past century acquired all the terms for the basic eight colors -- white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, and gray -- and several words were derived from other languages. Finnish is establishing the borrowed word "violetti" for purple. The words for orange and pink are very recent, very obvious, loan words in both Finnish and Basque.

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