Sex, communism, and dangerous red things - On the semantics of the Hungarian words piros and vörös

Abstract: The topic of Basic Colour Terms (BCT) and their proposed universality has long been a source of debate within linguistics. Whether colour terms (as symbols) fill lexical gaps of presumed universal colour categories (as senses) or not is relevant for the debate regarding linguistic relativity: the hypothesis about the influence of language on the way we think. Until now, there has been a focus on different terms for GREEN and/or BLUE, and whether, for example, the two Russian terms for “dark blue” and “light blue” show that Russian speakers have two colour categories that differ from English speakers. Hungarian has two colour terms for RED (piros and vörös), but these terms have not been investigated within the field of linguistic relativity. However, there has instead been an extensive debate on whether one of the two terms, vörös, is to be considered a BCT at all. If vörös is a BCT, it opens up for the possibility of testing for linguistic relativity in Hungarian as well. But before such a test can be done, we must determine the basicness of vörös. The focus of this thesis is therefore to investigate the semantics of the Hungarian words for RED: piros and vörös. The thesis consists of three studies, two of which were main studies: the first aimed to test for denotational differences between piros and vörös, and the aim of the second study was to test whether piros and vörös can be applied to the same objects, and if so, if there is a difference in semantic connotations between the two terms. The third study looked for a confirmation for the assumed difference in semantic connotations. The results of the studies show that vörös should be considered a BCT. The term denotes a darker shade of red than piros, and has connotations of sex/passion and danger.