K voprosu o semantike cvetonaimenovanij kitajskogo jazyka, vosxodjaščix k tematičeskoj gruppe "fauna" [On semantics of Chinese colour terms derived from the 'fauna' thematic group]

The process of lexemes' transformation from designation of colours of animals itself into general colour terms had been previously discovered in many languages.The article is dedicated to this process in Chinese language. Having analyzed the examples from the ancient Chinese classic books and etymological dictionaries, it was discovered that xing and li transformed from the colours of the animals into the "red" and "black" respectively. As regards the very particular term liuhuang, one of the classic "mixed" coloures in the theory of "Five Elements", it was defined as "greenish-yellow" in the dictionaries, though we discovered, that semantically it referred to the brown colour.