Towards a Diachronic Analysis of Old Norse Icelandic Color Terms

The Cases of Green and Yellow

Abstract

In their landmark cross-cultural study Basic Color Terms (1969), Brent Berlin and Paul Kay argue that color terms are added to languages in a fixed order, and that this order is universal in nature. They identify eleven basic color categories and maintain that these are mapped systematically to the corresponding color terms of a given language in seven stages: I: white and black, II: red, III: green or yellow, IV: yellow or green, V: blue, VI: brown, and VII: purple, pink, orange, and grey. This paper examines Berlin and Kay's stages III and IV, that is, the introduction of terms for green and yellow, as they apply to Old Norse-Icelandic. It demonstrates through linguistic categorization the objects about which green (grænn) and yellow (gulr) are used and shows on the basis of their frequency in Old Norse-Icelandic texts that although grænn often seems contextually restricted and appears without appreciation of the color and more in the abstract meaning of fertile, it should be assigned a stage before gulr, despite the fact that gulr is attested as a color adjective in Proto-Indo-European (*ghel-) and Proto-Germanic (*gelwaz), whereas grænn is not attested until Proto-Germanic (*gro:njaz). Derivatives of gull (gull-, gullinn, gylltr) and bleikr seem to have been the primary terms used to describe the color yellow in the earliest literary works. When gulr begins to appear, the collocations suggest that "shiny" was its primary conceptual component and that its use as a pure color term came later, at which time bleikr began to shed some of its semantic portfolio.