Sixteen Hundred Color Terms in Persian Language

Abstract

Color terms and color naming is a matter that has frequently drawn the attention of the linguists. Human eyes can identify more than seven million colors. Languages in different cultures have tried to represent lexically a range of them. Color terms and their typology is considered as one of the pivotal studies in recent decades. While there are Persian words for the colors, each year, due to inaccessibility, several non-Persian color terms enter this language. This article is aimed at representing a list of Persian color terms, studying their morphological structure, their localization and enrichment of Persian language and culture. More than sixteen hundred color terms have been collected by the writer. These terms can be divided into simple and complex words. Only 2.74% of Persian color terms are simple and 97.26% of them have complex structure. Persian speakers create color terms through suffixation and syntactic processes. 50.50% of complex color terms have derivational structure and the remaining 46.76% are compound. Derivation and compounding are the most productive and frequent processes in the formation of Persian color terms.

Keywords

• color terms
• persian language
• morphology
• color-word-formation processes