Articles
System of colour terms in the ancient Japanese language
Ekaterina Levchenko
Vostok/Oriens '2017, №1
Going through the “Kojiki”, “Nihon Shoki” ,and “Man’yoshu” songs it is possible to divide the references to colours according to whether they belong to the category of red, blue, white or black. The question how clearly defined was the ancient people’s consciousness of colours, brings us to the idea that their cognizance of colours was contiguous to the way in which they perceived the colours occurring in nature. The present article describes connections between words, colour images and perception of colours in Old Japanese. First, I am going to speak about psychology of colour perception and the theory of colour nominations. Second, I will give structural analysis of basic colours lexemes in Old Japanese and its co-occurrence with nouns. Then I am going to give a scheme of colour lexemes in Old Japanese according to Anna Wierzbicka’s theory of semantic primitives. Finally, I will attempt to explain the special traces of functioning of colour nominations in Old Japanese, using the philosophy of colour by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Keywords: Old Japanese, Kojiki songs, Nihon Shoki songs, Man’yôshû, basic colours, colours perception, primitive linguistic image of the world
Pages: С. 88–102
