Blue In Old English.An Interdisciplinary Semantic Study. (Costerus NS 110)
Publisher: Editions Rodopi
Published: January 1997
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 333
ISBN-13: 9789042001480
Subjects: Literary studies: general; Anglo-Saxon
First sentence: In reading around the subject of colour in Old English, the researcher is faced with a collection of despairing or disparaging statements such as the following: The remarkable fact about a great number of the Old English words that possibly are to be taken as color-words, is that they are so indefinite in their application as scarcely to permit us to decide whether a color-effect is intended or not' (1899),' 'No satisfactory explanation of the colour vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon... has yet been advanced' (1951),2 'Various attempts have been made by Anglo-Saxonists to deal with the Old English colour vocabulary but the subject remains far from clear' (1974),3 The word hwit as used here is not one of those all-too-familiar Old English color words so indefinite as to the particular hue they denote..., and so often, by modern standards, indefinitely applied' (1980).4