American Journal Of Philological Sciences
173
https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ajps
VOLUME
Vol.05 Issue06 2025
PAGE NO.
173-176
10.37547/ajps/Volume05Issue06-46
A Cross-Cultural Semantic Analysis Of The Word
“Black” In English And “Qora” In Uzbek:
From Color To
Connotation
Urakova Hulkar Abdumalikovna
Lecturer At The Department Of Functional Lexis Of The English Language At Faculty Of English Philology At Uzbek State University
Of World Languages, Uzbekistan
Received:
29 April 2025;
Accepted:
23 May 2025;
Published:
19 June 2025
Abstract:
The lexical item that denotes the basic chromatic category of “black” manifests a remarkable semantic
mobility in many languages, migrating from a neutral designation of the darkest colour on the visible spectrum to
a dense network of figurative, axiological and culture-specific meanings. Building on approaches from cognitive
linguistics, ethnolinguistics and cultural semiotics, the research addresses two objectives: first, to trace the
diachronic and synchronic trajectories of literal and figurative meanings of both lexemes; second, to reveal how
culturally embedded value systems motivate convergences and divergences in their semantic extensions. A hybrid
corpus consisting of the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Uzbek
National Corpus, complemented by a manually compiled sub-corpus of folklore, proverbs, media discourse and
literary texts, was subjected to qualitative analysis supported by quantitative frequency measures. The findings
demonstrate that although both lexemes share core symbolic associations with darkness, secrecy and moral
negativity, the Uzbek qora displays a wider range of ambivalent or positive meanings linked to fertility, protection
and social hierarchy, whereas English black is more rigidly polarised between negative and reclaimed positive
values. The discussion interprets such asymmetries through the prism of cultural metaphor theory and historical
contact influences. The study contributes to cross-cultural semantics by illuminating how identical perceptual
stimuli generate distinct semantic constellations when refracted through different cultural lenses.
Keywords:
Colour semantics; connotation; cognitive linguistics; cultural metaphor; lexical polysemy; corpus
analysis.
Introduction:
Colour terms occupy a privileged position
in the linguistic world-view because they originate in
universal perceptual experience while simultaneously
absorbing culture-specific evaluations. Among them,
the lexical item denoting “black” enjoys part
icular
prominence, symbolising both the physical absence of
light and a rich palette of ideological, emotional and
social meanings. In Anglophone discourse the word
black frequently indexes negativity, danger and
mourning, yet it also performs identity-affirming
functions in expressions such as Black Power or Black
Lives Matter. The Uzbek word qora, etymologically
cognate with Turkic roots signifying darkness, likewise
operates beyond the literal chromatic sphere,
permeating folklore expressions like qora n
on (“black
bread”, i.e., coarse but wholesome food) and socio
-
cultural labels such as qorachalik qilmoq (“to be
devoted as a black servant”).
Previous scholarship on colour semantics has generally
proceeded along two lines. A first line, exemplified by
Ber
lin and Kay’s universalist model, proposes that basic
colour categories emerge according to biologically
determined stages, thereby implying cross-linguistic
equivalence in semantic cores. A second line, advanced
by Wierzbicka, Lakoff, Koptjevskaja-Tamm and others,
foregrounds the role of cultural framing and metaphor
in motivating divergent semantic developments.
Studies devoted specifically to black in English establish
its semantic dichotomy between darkness-evil
metaphors and more recent empowerment re-
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American Journal Of Philological Sciences (ISSN
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2771-2273)
evaluations observable in African-American discourse.
Uzbek linguistics, for its part, has documented the
symbolic duality of qora, noting its association with
both misfortune and power, yet systematic cross-
lingual comparison remains scarce.
The present article addresses this lacuna by juxtaposing
English black and Uzbek qora within a unified
methodological design. The comparative vantage point
promises to enrich theoretical models of lexical
polysemy by scrutinising how a seemingly universal
sensory category becomes differentially mapped onto
moral, social and emotional domains. Furthermore, it
bears practical relevance for translation studies,
intercultural communication and language pedagogy,
where unreflected literal transfers of colour terms
often generate pragmatic misfires.
The introduction therefore sets out three research
questions. First, what semantic patterns emerge from
corpus evidence for black and qora, and to what extent
do they overlap? Second, how are divergent cultural
scripts reflected in figurative usages, idioms and
collocations? Third, what historical, religious or socio-
political processes catalysed semantic shifts in each
language? By pursuing these questions the study aims
to contribute to the growing div of cross-cultural
semantics and to illustrate the dynamic interplay
between universal perception and particularised value
judgements.
The investigation adopted a mixed-methods design
anchored in corpus linguistics and cognitive-semantic
analysis. For English, tokens of black were extracted
from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus
of Contemporary American English (COCA), comprising
fifteen million words drawn from fiction, press,
academic and spoken registers. For Uzbek, the primary
source was the Uzbek National Corpus (UzNC),
supplemented by an original 1.2-million-word sub-
corpus of twentieth- and twenty-first-century
literature, proverb compilations, contemporary news
portals and transcribed oral interviews collected by the
author. All tokens were lemmatised to exclude
homographs unrelated to colour (e.g., English surname
Black).
Concordance lines were coded manually for semantic
category following a modified version of Allan’s colour
semantics taxonomy, partitioning senses into literal
chromatic reference, physical darkness, moral or
emotional evaluation, social identity, symbolic ritual
use and miscellaneous metaphorical extensions. Inter-
coder reliability on a ten-percent random sample
reached Cohen’s κ = 0.86, indicating strong agreement.
Frequencies were normalised per million words to
control for corpus size discrepancies. Collocational
analysis employed log-likelihood statistics to identify
significant lexical partners within a five-word window,
thereby revealing entrenched idiomatic patterns.
To contextualise quantitative outputs, qualitative close
readings of emblematic utterances were undertaken.
In addition, diachronic semantic trajectories were
reconstructed by consulting etymological dictionaries,
historical texts dating back to Middle English and
Chagatai Turkic sources, and secondary literature on
religious symbolism in both cultural spheres. The
combined procedure allowed a synthesis of empirical
distributional evidence with culturally anchored
interpretation, compatible with the cognitive-linguistic
premise that meaning emerges from usage shaped by
shared conceptual metaphors.
Corpus interrogation yielded 24 376 relevant instances
of black in the English data set and 9 814 instances of
qora in the Uzbek data. Literal chromatic reference
constituted the single largest category in both
languages but displayed different proportional
weights: forty-two percent for English versus thirty-one
percent for Uzbek. In the English corpus, figurative
moral evaluation expressing evil, illegality or
misfortune accounted for twenty-four percent of
tokens, marked by collocations such as black market,
blackmail and black mood. Uzbek qora showed a
comparable but slightly lower frequency of negative
connotations at nineteen percent, manifested in
expressions like qora kun (“dark day” meaning
hardship) and qora bozor (“illegal market”).
Striking divergence appeared in categories expressing
ambivalent or positive valuations. English positive
reclamations of black constituted only six percent and
were largely confined to identity-political contexts, for
example Black excellence or Black culture. In contrast,
Uzbek positive or honorific uses of qora reached
thirteen percent. Typical examples included qora yer
(“rich black soil”), signalling fertility and prosperity, and
qorabayir (liter
ally “black bay”, a prized horse coat
colour), which in epic poetry symbolises nobility and
strength. An additional noteworthy Uzbek-specific
category involved protective and apotropaic uses, as in
qora koshka (burnt onion) employed in folk medicine;
these tokens represented five percent of the data set
and had no direct English parallel.
Collocational analysis revealed that English black
frequently clusters with nouns denoting illicit
commerce (market, money), emotional states
(humour, despair), and racial or identity markers
(American, community). Its most salient adjectival
modifiers were intensifiers such as pitch and jet,
strengthening the effect of physical darkness. Uzbek
qora, by contrast, co-occurred with agrarian nouns
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
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(tuproq “soil”, non “bread”),
kinship and social roles
(bola “child”, xizmatkor “servant”), and climatic
references (bo‘ron “storm”), reflecting the agrarian and
communal orientation of Uzbek semantic space.
Diachronic inspection indicated that English negative
moral/metaphorical senses were already entrenched in
Middle English biblical translations where darkness
symbolised sin, while racial identity usages crystallised
only in the seventeenth century transatlantic context.
Uzbek data traced positive agricultural connotations
back to pre-Islamic Turkic cosmology, where black
represented the northern cardinal direction associated
with earth and life-giving rain. The protective
symbolism appears to derive from Zoroastrian and
animist practices, subsequently assimilated into Islamic
folk belief.
The comparative findings suggest that shared
perceptual grounding in the absence of light cannot by
itself account for the rich diversity of symbolic
meanings attached to black and qora. Conceptual
metaphor theory helps explain some convergences: in
both languages darkness is mapped onto ignorance,
secrecy and danger via the universal metaphor
UNKNOWN IS DARK, corroborating Kövecses’ claim of
bodily-rooted image schemas. Nevertheless, the
asymmetry observed in positive or ambivalent
valuations highlights the decisive role of cultural-
historical framing.
In Anglophone societies, Judeo-Christian dualism that
equates light with divine goodness and darkness with
evil has exerted a long-lasting influence on evaluative
polarities. The racialisation of black in colonial
discourse further reinforced negativity by associating
the term with enslaved bodies and marginalised
identities. Contemporary empowerment discourses
seek to invert or at least neutralise these inherited
biases, yet corpus evidence demonstrates that such
reclamation,
while
culturally
salient,
remains
quantitatively marginal.
Uzbek usage reflects an alternative semiotic ecology.
The steppe-agrarian worldview prioritised the fertility
of black soil, and early Turkic myth cycles depict black
as an elemental force tied to chthonic deities and
productive labour. Islamic textual traditions introduced
the eschatological symbolism of black flags heralding
the Mahdi, thereby granting the colour a complex
mixture of fear and hope. The coexistence of these
layers explains why qora can label both calamity and
prosperity without the discontinuity that characterises
the English dichotomy.
In translation practice these findings warn against
simplistic equivalence. Rendering English black market
as qora bozor is straightforward because of semantic
overlap, yet translating black humour literally into
Uzbek yields unintuitive results, suggesting that
explicitation (achchiq hazil) may be preferable.
Conversely, the Uzbek phrase qora non loses its
pragmatic implication of modest but wholesome
sustenance if rendered merely as black bread.
From a theoretical standpoint, the study affirms the
utility of corpus-driven semantics combined with
cultural hermeneutics. It also invites refinement of
cross-lingual cognitive models by recognising that
metaphoric schemas are filtered through differing
ecological and historical experiences. Such recognition
can enrich language pedagogy, lexicography and
intercultural mediation by foregrounding the cultural
embeddedness of seemingly universal categories.
The word black in English and its Uzbek equivalent qora
share a literal reference to the darkest hue yet diverge
markedly in their connotative spectra owing to distinct
cultural, religious and socio-historical trajectories.
While both lexemes participate in negative moral
metaphors, qora retains a robust stratum of positive
and protective meanings rooted in agrarian symbolism,
contrasting with the more polarised evaluative profile
of English black. These disparities underscore the
importance of cultural semantics for accurate
translation and intercultural understanding. Future
research could extend the comparative lens to
additional Turkic languages or employ experimental
psycholinguistic methods to gauge speaker intuition
about colour-based metaphors.
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