Today in elicitation session, Mackenzie and I decided to elicit numbers and colors. We had been given broad hints that colors in Ilocano are quite different from colors in English - and so it is! Ilocano only has four colors: black, white, red, and yellow. Things like blue, purple, and green are all called "not very black," and things like orange and pink are called "not very red." Whoa! Our LRP said that they now have borrowed words for "brown" and "green"... but it's just mind-bending to think that to an Ilocano speaker who has never learned English or another language with more color terms, the sky and the grass are both "not very black."
The different ways speakers of different languages look at the world are just plain fascinating.
(Numbers, by the way, are fairly straightforward. You count to ten, and eleven is "ten plus one," etc., and twenty is "two tens.")
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