14 Adjectives in Lao 341'early morning', suajs 'late morning', vem 'daytime', and dek2 'late at night' behave
like adjectives (taking direct negation and Type A reduplication), but show fair-
ly restricted possibilities for occurrence with nominal arguments. Mostly, they are
used adverbially:
(84) £66«3 dek.2
time.period late.at.night
'the period late at night'
(85) £66«3 dek0-dek2
time.period REDUP-late.at.night
'the period late-ish at night'
(86) pheni maa2 dek.2
3SG come late.at.night
'S/he came late at night.'
Not all circadian time-period terms behave in this way. The terms ven.2 'daytime'
and saw4 'early morning' may be Type A reduplicated, but require the addition of
teei 'from' in adverbial function:
(87) foo«3 saw0-saw4
time.period REDUP-early.morning
'early-ish in the morning'
(88) pheni maa2 *(teei) saw4
3SG come from early.morning
'S/he came in the early morning.'
While khuum 'night' does occur as a modifier in the expression foo«3 khuum
[time.period night] 'night time', it cannot be used at all as an adverbial modifier
(89), nor can it be Type A reduplicated (90):
(89) *pheni maa2 (teei) khuim.2
3SG come from night
(S/he came at night.)
(90) *tooni khuntf-khuum
time.period REDUP-night
(the night-ish period)
4.8. COLOUR TERMS
There are two classes of words used to describe COLOUR in Lao. The class of pri-
mary colour terms consists of five adjectives: khaaw^ 'white', dam?, 'black', deengi
'red', khiawi 'blue/green, and luangj, 'yellow'. These behave like regular adjectives,
taking direct negation, acting as direct nominal modifiers, appearing in compara-
tive expressions, and allowing Type A reduplication. Secondary colour terms are