Kas ungari keeles on kaks punase värvi põhinime piros ja vörös?
Are there two basic colour terms piros and vörös for red in Hungarian?

Summary/Abstract: The Hungarian colour terms piros and vörös have served as a topic of discussion since the late 19th century to this day. Linguists have mostly argued about the specific colours that these words denote. A number of possibilities have been suggested. According to the most common view, piros denotes light red and vörös dark red. However, according to the vantage theory by Robert MacLaury, piros need not be light, but its recessive partner vörös does denote dark red. Our empirical tests conducted in Hungary do not confirm it. Second, it has been suggested that vörös denotes red with a yellowish overtone while piros denotes red with a bluish overtone. Third, it has been claimed that both piros and vörös denote one and the same colour; only their usage depends on the linguistic context and has an emotional background. Thus, the colour term piros is mostly associated with positive emotions and pleasant things while vörös is associated with negative emotions, bad things, and occurs in idioms with a warning content. Starting with the 1969 classical study by Berlin and Kay “Basic color terms: their universality and evolution” linguists have been interested in whether both Hungarian words denoting red piros and vörös are basic colour terms, as Berlin and Kay claim. It is commonly thought that in Hungarian both piros and vörös are basic colour terms; at the same time no empirical tests have been conducted to support this claim. In 2002 and 2003 Mari Bogatkin interviewed 125 native speakers of Hungarian in Hungary. The answers enable us to conclude that in Hungarian only piros is a basic colour term. The colour term vörös is not a basic colour term. Thus, Hungarian is in line with the theory by Berlin and Kay and is not an exception. In Hungarian there are 11 basic colour terms fehér ‘white’, fekete ‘black’, piros ‘red’, zöld ‘green’, sárga ‘yellow’, kék ‘blue’, barna ‘brown’, lila ‘purple’, rózsaszín ‘pink’, narancssárga ‘orange’, and szürke ‘grey’. The use of two terms for red in Hungarian (syntagmatic and paradigmatic collocations) could be an areal phenomenon because a similar use of two terms for red can be found (at least) in Czech, too.

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