Black and Bright and Beautiful

[Bjarte Kaldhol]

According to my English-Tibetan dictionary, the modern Tibetan word for
green is ljang-khu (colour of flag), or sngon-po (colour of grass). Green
vegetables are called sngo-tshal (Lhasa-pronunciation: ngoptsee). There are
also, however:

ljang-smug or ljang-nag = dark green
ljang-dkar or ljang-skya = light green
ljang se = yellowish green

But "blue" is also sngon-po, so Tibetan may not feel the need to
distinguish between these two colours. If something is "completely blue",
whatever that is, Tibetans would say it is "sngo mthing-mthing". I might
add that sometimes when I say something is "blue", my daughter corrects me,
asserting that I am unable to distinguish between blue and green. What is
blue to me, is apparently green to her.

Best wishes,
Bjarte Kaldhol


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> From: Stephen Hodge <s.hodge at PADMACHOLING.FREESERVE.CO.UK>
> To: INDOLOGY at LISTSERV.LIV.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: Black and Bright and Beautiful
> Date: 11. november 2000 14:50
>
> 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