Prototypical objects in color terms: a typological study of Sakha, Russian, Finnish, and Italian languages

This article presents a typological study of prototypical objects for basic color terms (‘black’, ‘white’, ‘red’, ‘yellow’, ‘blue’, ‘green’) across structurally and genetically diverse languages – Sakha, Russian, Finnish, and Italian. The relevance of this research stems from the need to investigate the relationship between linguistic mechanisms of color naming and cultural-ecological factors, particularly for Sakha, whose system of color terms remains understudied. We aim to identify both universal and culture-specific prototypical objects. The core concept of the research is “prototypical object” – a cultural-cognitive referent that serves as a benchmark for representing a color feature in language. For Sakha, prototypical objects were identified through etymological analysis, dictionary definitions, and denotative attributes, while data for the other languages were drawn from available sources. Sixty-three prototypes were classified into thematic groups (artifacts, body parts, pyrogenic objects, food, objects of nature) and analyzed quantitatively to determine predominant color naming sources. The results reveal a nature-centric orientation – natural objects constitute 50,8% of all prototypes. Such objects as ‘coal’ for black, ‘snow’ and ‘milk’ for white, ‘blood’ and ‘strawberry’ for red, ‘grass’ for green, and ‘sky’ for blue were identified as universal. We also establish a correlation between environmental conditions, types of economic systems, and the prototypical objects: the hunting-adaptive type (Sakha), the nature-agrarian type (Russian and Finnish), and the gastronomic-aesthetic type (Italian). Whereas northern hunting cultures demonstrate ecological determinism through adaptation to extreme climates, Italian culture exhibits gastronomic-aesthetic orientation shaped by favorable Mediterranean environment.

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