hair's colour in sanskrit

[Peter J. Claus]

And chicken eggs are brown, not white... Well, sometimes white and
sometimes various shades (ie. colors) betweeen white and brown.

Peter Claus


On Mon, 12 May 1997, Allen Thrasher wrote:

> Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 16:03:02 BST
> From: Allen Thrasher <athr at loc.gov>
> Reply-To: indology at liverpool.ac.uk
> To: Members of the list <indology at liverpool.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: hair's colour in sanskrit
> 
> On Fri, 9 May 1997, Lars Martin Fosse wrote:
> > 
> > There is a similar problem with Greek colours. The only way to know, is when
> > colour terms are referred to natural phenomena that haven't changed since
> > ancient times. E.g. white may be referred to the egg of a hen, red to a
> > given kind of red berries, brown to soil etc. 
> 
> Brown referring to soil is a much less felicitous example than the other
> two.  Soils can also be (in American English) black, yellow, etc.  In much
> of my state of Virginia it is a beautiful red.  And in countries which
> have undergone intensive agriculture for many centuries one can't assume
> the soil's color is the same as it was in the time of some classic
> literature.
> 
> 
> Allen Thrasher
> 
> 
>