Achromatic colors in the Ukrainian and German languages

Abstract

 Abstract.The notion of colour, despite its day-to-day use and a shade of simplicity and primitivism, represents a deep and wide phenomenon reflecting the linguistic culture of a particular nation.

The article is dedicated to the problem of color notions in comparative linguistics. The general definition of the term “achromatic colors” is given in the scientific investigation; it is stated what specific color names can be referred as achromatic ones; the semantic analysis of achromatic colors in the German and Ukrainian languages is carried out.

Analysis of the actual material over this issue shows the belonging of white, black and gray to achromatic colours. It should be noted that representatives of different ethnical groups started to distinguish gray shades and to use the colouroneme “gray” much later than the adjectives “black” and “white”. The reason for this is that, first of all, the gray doesn’t belong to gay colours, and, secondly, it is a result of mixing up the white and black colours. That is why the name “gray colour” cannot remain outside the purview of of research.

This research deals with three achromatic colours in the German and Ukrainian languages: white and black as a kind of poles in the perception of dark and light objects, and gray as the intermediate one, or a transitional tone between the two above mentioned colours.

All achromatic colours are often characterized by a certain metaphorical field: white stands for purity, calmness; black symbolizes sadness, grief. Without looking at their pretended narrow semantics, it is up to achromatic colours to assume the function of symbolic metaphors rather than indirect nominations in the language.

It should be added that achromatic colours play a significant role in fiction books. Their usage contributes to the restraint and laconicism of a text. Black and white colours in the dressing of protagonists as well as coloured hair give us an immediate idea of inner features the author attributes to the characters. The same can be said about  “man in gray”. These are traditional colours possessing the ability to highlight priorities in the text.

In addition, the German language has much more compound adjectives made of achromatic colours in comparison with Ukrainian. Certainly, there are some words in the Ukrainian languages as snow-white, dark-haired, but more actively used colour names with the elements “gray”, “black” and “white” are the compound adjectives “pale-gray”, “dark-grey” etc.  Thanks to the word formation peculiarities, there are much more such words in the German language.

Semantics of the colour name “white” in the Ukrainian language is wider than in German, nevertheless the nature objects with which this colour is compared are the same, which shows that the world picture of old Ukrainian and old Germans was similar. As for the fixed set expressions with the mentioned colour name in both languages, as we can see from examples, they are not always translated, as the languages do not always have an appropriate set expression with an adjective denoting the colour, especially when the languages are not related as in case with German and Ukrainian.

The German colouroneme schwarz is not characterised by such a wide range of notions as its Ukrainian analogue, but partially it can be explained by the material representation: in the process of semantic analysis of this colouroneme the metaphoric meanings were not included as it was dome by the Ukrainian lexicographers of Great Thesaurus of the Ukrainian language. Moreover, in opposition to the Ukrainian adjective “чорний”,  the German variant of the colouroneme does not have such semantic meanings as old and politic phenomena. In generally, we can state that semantically these two colouronemes are almost identical in both languages.

The detailed characteristics of the semantic meanings of the colour  “gray” in the German and Ukrainian languages shows that in metaphoric meaning this colouroneme is used as much often as in direct meaning, but the range of its meanings is more narrow compared to the above-mentioned adjective “black” and almost equal in sense of semantics to  the adjective “white”.

With the help of the examples we define in the article that even the nature phenomena and household articles used for the comparison as a part of adjectives are identical in both languages, that serves as a proof of the similar world perception of the different ethnic groups.