Основы теории английского языка. Листунова Е.И. - 30 стр.

      II.
      Read the following passage.
      How differently the raw material of experience is elaborated by vari-
ous languages can be seen even in such a preeminently concrete field as the
scale of colours. The spectrum is a continuous band, without any sharp
boundaries; the number and nature of colour distinctions is therefore
largely a matter of habit and convention. The Greeks and Romans had a
poorer palette than our modern language; there was, for example, no
generic term for ‘brown’ or ‘grey’ in Latin: modern Romance forms like
French brun and gris are borrowings from Germanic. There is no single
word for ‘grey’ in modern Lithuanian either; different words are used to
denote the grey colour of wool, of horses, cows or human hair. Colour
terms employed in other languages will often appear more differentiated,
or less differentiated, than our own, although it would be more correct to
say that the field is divided up on different principles. Thus Russian
distinguishes between sinij ‘dark blue’ and goluboj ‘sky blue’; conversely,
the Greek has a wide range of applications, some with and some without a
notion of colour: ‘gleaming, silvery; blush-green, light blue, grey’. Oddly
enough, there is a somewhat similar accumulation of meanings in a Japa-
nese colour adjective, awo, which can mean ‘green’, ‘blue’ and ‘dark’; it
can be used when speaking of ‘green vegetable’ the ‘blue sea’, or ‘dark
clouds’. Elsewhere, the discrepancies are even more marked. The Navaho
Indians, for example, have two terms corresponding to ‘black’, one de-
noting the black of darkness, the other the black of such objects as coal.
Our ‘grey’ and ‘brown’, however, correspond to a single term in their
language, and likewise our ‘blue’ and ‘green’.
                                  Stephen Ullmann. Language and Style.
     III.
     Classify the units in the following poem into lexical sets and,
further, synonymic series.
                        The Cataract of Lodore
                             (fragments)
                                                      by Robert Southey
     Here it comes sparkling,
     And there it lies darkling.
     Here smoking and frothing,
     Its tumult and wrath in,

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