Colours

The primary colour terms are illustrated in the table below. Unlike the English terms, these are not nouns naming the colours but are verbs. duldzan, for example, means “it/he/she is blue”. They may be inflected like other verbs. One can, for example, say duzdzan “I am blue” and dutildzan “he will be blue”.

Like many other verbs, the colour terms may take absolutive classifier prefixes. The table below shows the third person singular in the generic, n-class, and wh-class forms. Most of the colour terms do not have a distinct d-class form. With a d-class subject, the generic form is used.

The colour terms illustrate a common phenomenon. When a verb has an inherent d in the same position as the one in which the d-classifier would occur, there is no distinct d-class form. As one might expect from the fact that it has no d prefix in its generic form, “white” has a distinct d-class form: dulyul.

There is some variation in how people use and translate dulba and other forms based on the root ba₁. “off-white” is probably the best way to describe it. This includes what might be described in English as “beige”, “blond”, “cream”, “light brown”, and “tan”. A related morpheme is the suffix -bai, used to form the names of white and albino animals, e.g. dunibai “albino moose”, susbai “Kermodei bear, albino black bear”.

Adding -yaz to a colour verb is similar to adding -ish in English. For example, dulk'unyaz means “it is reddish”.

To ask “what colour is it?”, four different words are used, one for each of the four absolutive classifier categories. These are:

For example, to ask the colour of a house you would use dahot'en, while to ask the colour of a ball you would use daoonat'en.

These too are verbs and may be inflected as such. For example, one can say daoost'en “What colour am I?" and daootast'en “What colour will I be?”.

Other colours may be expressed by the secondary colour terms, which are formed by adding the verb dot'en “it looks like, is the colour of” to the name of an item of the appropriate colour. There are familiar items that are commonly used for familiar colours, but if necessary you can describe a colour by comparing it to that of anything the addressee can be expected to be familiar with.

By combining lhawh “many” with dot'en we obtain lhawh dot'en “it is many-coloured”.

The secondary colour terms do not have different forms for different shapes.

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