Color terms

Despite boundless enthusiasm for color as a topic in itself, I've dragged my feet on this for a long time, for reasons I'll get to in a moment. The progression of color term assignment in Koa has been interesting, reminiscent of Berlin and Kay's study: initially red and blue, then later green, then later yellow, then much later orange and purple.

It has been a very difficult decision which color terms to classify as basic, and I've been extremely cautious to move forward because of a sharp awareness that my English-based instincts were certain to influence my judgment. In the end, realizing that to some extent any choice will have arbitrary components, I decided on a base favoring symmetry on the color wheel from the standpoint of a classical RYB paint-based model. A couple hopefully justifiable additions at the end round things out. Here's the system as it currently stands.

kona "black"
liko "white"

puna "red"
kinu "orange"
mele "yellow"
vihe "green"
sini "blue"
lie "purple"

teta "brown"
lusu "gray"

I dithered on orange and purple for ages -- ten years longer than the others -- and still feel uncomfortable with them knowing just how many languages they're not basic in. Nonetheless I really can't see a way forward without them, so I'll deal with it!

For the rest, despite technically being a kind of dark orange I considered brown to be reasonable given its cross-linguistic distribution, and gray for its usefulness in describing other intermediate colors. In a way I wish that the system looked less like English, but on the other hand at least I didn't include pink, and as a language for the modern world I feel like it'll be capable of handling color theory without a lot of excesses.

Blends between primary and secondary colors are formed as compounds. Theoretically the head might be the base color, with the modifying predicate indicating a small amount of an additional color:

mélevihe "yellow-green" (a hue of green with a little yellow added)
víhemele "green-yellow" (a hue of yellow with a little green added)

In practice, though, it may be more reasonable to conceive of a single tertiary color between each primary and secondary, permitting either root ordering but preferring primary-secondary, thus

púnakinu "vermillion"
mélekinu "amber/marigold"
mélevihe "chartreuse"
sínivihe "teal/aqua"
sínilie "violet"
púnalie "magenta"

A wild impulse is urging me to create single roots for these, which would allow delicious quaternary color compounds like scarlet (red-vermillion) and indigo (blue-violet). I'll hold off for the moment (sigh) but this whole area is difficult because of how accustomed I've become to beautiful single-word descriptions of so very many colors these days. How will we express sage? Olive? Taupe? Most likely it'll be necessary to come up with more or less standardized forms based on mia "color" and a noun: mialumo "sand," maybe? And additions of nominal descriptors to the colors themselves: híkivihe "grass green."

Moving on to modifications of a starting hue, we can express saturation and tint/tone/shade as follows:

válosini "bright blue (high saturation of blue)"
kícasini "light blue (low saturation of blue, or blue mixed with white)"
pímesini "dark blue (blue mixed with black)"
lúsusini "gray blue (blue mixed with gray)"

There's also a possibility of compounds with lahu "murky, obscure, overcast" to denote, probably, combinations with brown (or with an opposing primary color, if you prefer).

Lastly, a small amount of pigmentation added to something else can be expressed with -si meaning "-ish":

púnasi "reddish"

There's clearly a lot more to come in this area, as usual no doubt to be determined (or at least necessitated) by actual usage. Hopefully this will at least be a solid starting point.