Black and Bright and Beautiful

[Stephen Hodge]

Valerie J. Roebuck wrote:
> This seems to represent the Sanskrit word s'yAma, which is
black/dark
> blue/green with connotations of "attractive" or "beautiful".  It is
used
> for e.g. the skin-colour of KRSNa, the colour of a rain-cloud, and
(in
> KAlidAsa, I think) for the colour of fresh grass after rain.
This seems a very reasonable explanation though looking through all
the Tib/Skt indices and dictionaries I have, "sngon-po" is
overwhelmingly the word of choice for "niila", occasionally for "hari"
and very rarely for "`syaama" for which another word is normally used;
and as I previously mentioned, I have only found "sngon-po" for the
skin-colour of Indians in native works not translations.   I can only
surmise that it must have entered into use in this way from some
translated text which had "sngon-po" for "`syaama".
While we are talking about "black/white", I can mention that the
Tibetan word for India is "rgya-gar" (white expanse) and "rgya-nag"
(black expanse) for China -- apparently because of the predominant
soil colour in Tibetan eyes.
Colour terminology can be quite surprising -- I have a Japanese book
which gives a huge range of terms with colour samples which shows that
a number of colours given conventinoal translations in English are
actually quite different to what we would call them ourselves -- the
word for purple being one example.   I wonder if anything has been
produced like this for other languages.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge