Timucua has several words that describe colors. In modern English there many different words used to describe color, so it might seem suprising that we only have six Timucua color words. But the Timucua language is following a well-established pattern. Linguists have written a great deal about how color words develop in world languages. They have discovered that most languages follow a “universal pattern” for color words.
For example, the most common color words in the word are dark and light, or “black” and “white.” After those color words, languages tend to have words for yellow, red, and perhaps a blue/green. That pattern can be observed in the Timucua language as well. Timucua contains words for black, white, red, yellow, and blue, which are the most frequent color words used around the world.
Some color words (such as ‘pink’, ‘brown’, and ‘orange’) which are found in English or Spanish are not attested in Timucua. It is possible that Timucua did not have special words for these colors; but it is also possible that there were words, but they were not recorded in the corpus. Timucua also tends to differentiate between red and purple. And the “universal pattern” suggests that languages first differentiate between green and blue before they develop a word for purple. Timucua does not follow this particular rule for color words, though again, it is important to remember that our corpus is incomplete.
Attested Color Words
| nayo/naio | white |
| cuchu | black |
| pira | red |
| curu | dark red/purple |
| nali | yellow |
| lico | blue/grey |
Uses/Meanings
Color words are imbued with meaning. Here are some of the connotations associated with the color words for white and black.
nayo/naio: it is used to mean clean (nayo nayo); it is used in many Catholic texts to signify purity ; Timucuas use it to refer to Spanish officials (Ano-naio holata/chief of the white people); it is used to describe silver (yereba nayo/metal white); and it is part of clan names, including hauenayo (white fox clan) and honoso nayo (white deer clan).
Chucu: it is used to mean dirty (chucu chucu); it is also to mean soil or dirt (uti chucu) (earth); it is used to describe Afro-descendants in the region (ano chucu/Black person); and it is used for coal (chu).
As you can see, there are many interesting parallels between the uses of nayo and cuchu.
For more reading:
Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969).
Barbara Saunders, “Revisiting basic color terms”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6 (2000): 81–9.
Joshua T. Abbott, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Terry Regier. “Focal Colours across Languages Are Representative Members of Color Categories”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (2016): 11178–83.
Don Derick, “Colour classification in natural languages,” Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization, edited by Birger Hjørland and Claudio Gnoli. https://www.isko.org/cyclo/colour#top