| >> | Pastoralists have many words for shades of color. The brown, white, yellow, grey, brown range can be absolutely huge. As you probably knew, most color systems don't distinguish blue from green. Black, white, red, yellow, green-blue, brown are the most stable. Grey is common. Pink is rare. Orange is basically unknown. There are a class of colors derived from plant and animal products eg. indigo, marron, lilac. These are always young and easy borrowed.
Emotional states may be universal but only the basic ones have specific roots. The usual rendition for higher emotional states is periphrasis with reference to "heart", "mind", "body", "eye". They don't say happy, they say "heart-pleased", they don't say snarky/irreverent, they say "hard-eyed", they don't say sad/depressed, they say "broken-hearted", they don't say brave but "heart-y". Furthermore, these expressions don't always translate to the same thing. "Heartlessness" means cruelty as in English but licentiousness in another language (and also conceivably cowardly).
This way of expressing feelings is productive in English when we don't use core emotions, verbal roots or borrowed words.
Semantic range of most expression is relative. The question is one o f degree. If there is no need for something to be distinguished, it doesn't get distinguished. Thus, lots of languages don't create words for digits greater than 5. 10, 20 and 100 numerals derive from roots meaning greatness or totality. This isn't merely limited to intangibles, distinguishing between lips-mouth, hand-arm, hand-leg is globally more absent than it is present.
I'm not sure why you feel motivated to challenge this. It's just more parsimonious to be relativistic. |
