Monday, September 04, 2006

Colours

No, I will not talk about the spelling of the word. I want to raise the subject of defining colours. There are many colours and in order to agree what the colour IS, you cannot really use words. For colours there is a standard, the RAL codes. This effort to bring quality to the delivery of colours started off with some 40 colours and now it defines some 1900.

Lemon yellow, is such a colour. It has the RAL-1012 code. Because of it's long existence, the colour indicated by this code has been translated to numerous languages; suurlemoengeel is the name of the colour in Afrikaans. When the colour is defined by the RAL code, and you use the names used with this colour, you have an identical meaning for the word. This is obvious as this is what the RAL codes are there for.

The question is, how to list the RAL codes themselves in WiktionaryZ. The RAL colours are a collection, we can describe them as such. We can also include the RAL-codes as an expression, the zxx language seems obvious to me. We can do either and we can do both.

Thanks,
GerardM

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