O cvetonaimenovanii v kitajskom jazyke [On colour names in Chinese]

It is considered that human eye is able to distinguish about seven thousand colours and tints. But as regards the colour terms, they are different in different languages. The article is dedicated to fussy colour terms in Chinese language, i.e. to polysemantic colour terms. The basic fussy colour term in Chinese is qing, which stands for green, blue and black colours. Having analysed some facts, it was found out that originally qing had stood for green. As regards the meaning «black», it was not created or dictated (as some Chinese linguists say), but either had come from some dialect, or during certain period had the meaning «dark» and later became transformed. The synonyms of qing are described as well. The closest synonyms of qing is cang, which has completely equal meanings in green-blue part of spectrum, but at the same time, on the contrary, stands for greyish white colour. Having used some etymological dictionaries, the following synonyms of qing in green-blue part of spectrum were discovered: bi, piao and cong, but they do not have a wide contextual combination ability.