How many words have the amazonian languages for green colour?

Answer 1

It is impossible to give an exact number, since many languages are now extinct, others are still not understood and there are various other complexities.

Many native American (meaning North, Central and South American) languages make no distinction at all between green and blue, using the same word for both.

An example is the Tupi word oby, which means green, or greenish-blue, or blue.

In the Arawak language, the word for green is imoro - this language adopted blu from the English word blue.

The Maxakali language uses the word yïxux for yellow, green or blue.

In Xavante, the word for green is 'u:jet-ti.

In Parakan, the element ax- means green: axoro (a green parrot), Peyria he'a raraxiga (Peyria has green eyes).

Perhaps the most incredible of all of the many hundreds of Amazonian languages is Pirahã, now spoken by fewer than 400 people. It is not related to any other known living language, the people who speak it are monolingual, no outsider had ever mastered it. The language has no simple colour words, no comparatives, no abstract concepts, no stories of the past, nor visions of the future. The Pirahã have no history, no fiction, no creation myth and no folklore. They have no concept of numbers, and no sense of right or left.

The language has three vowels and eight consonants for men, and the same number of vowels but only seven consonants for women. There is a supply of nouns, but each verb has up to 16 suffixes, which may be present or absent: thus, 2 to the power of 16, making 65,536 possible forms for each and any Pirahã verb. To complicate matters further, there is hum speech, musical speech and whistle speech.