Apprivoiser la richesse des couleurs sur la palette du peintre, ou vers une liste terminologique des noms de couleurs

Résumé

HOW TO MASTER THE ABUNDANCE OF COLOURS ON THE PAINTER’S PALETTE, OR A STEP TOWARDS THE TERMINOLOGICAL LIST OF TERMS RELATED TO COLOURS

Colour as a subject has led to numerous studies in various disciplines such as physics, psychology, chemistry or history of art, to name a few. In the field of linguistics, the names of colours have been analysed from different points of view but all those works concerned mostly the words related to colours used in the general language. The aim of the present paper is to focus on the terms related to colours used in history of art texts, and to show the unexpected complexity of such terminology. After presenting the definitions of colour we will describe two different aspects of French terminology related to colour: firstly, the forms of terms from the point of view of their morphological and semantic motivation, and secondly, the cultural and historical reasons of such linguistic abundance and complexity of the colours’ terminology.