ANTONYM
COMPARE
MOVING AXIS
BUILDING BLOCK
QUOTES
The meaning of 600 Dutch words that contain the vowels A, A and O, such as in ‘vagabond’ or ‘catacombs’, were compared in several languages. AAO-translations of Dutch AAO-words were examined in Hungarian (HG), Italian (IT) and Spanish (SP). In a lesser degree were used: English (EN), French (FR), Old and Modern Greek (OG and MG), Latin (LT), Romanian (RH), Polish (PL), Serbo-Croatian (SK) and Turkish (TS). This research of F. Alpaerts (1984) shows a connection between the triplet vowels AAO, and the colour combination black-on-blue. Because some keywords are related, Alpaerts classified them into themed clusters.
- Attack: The direct physical violence. The threat to property (robbery, looting, mugging). The physical and psychological attack on the body (disease, infection by impurity). Psychic attacks (abrasive, rancor). Attacks on the social body: violating social purity rules (inappropriate behavior, swearing, sexual offenses). Attack on the culture (immigration, marginality, and poverty).
- Death (religious): The boundary of life (death). The dying (illness, diseased, weary). The abode of the dead (tombs, catacombs, cemeteries). The cult of the dead (Pharaohs, ancestor worship, funeral rites).
- Haggler (costly, money, wasteful). Fear of loss of property is agony.
- Border (maggoty, wasteland, abandoned, vagabond). Crossing borders, whether national, social, cultural, or regarding the body or property are associated with contamination and death.
- Braggart (make an impression)
- Rest and unrest (lying down, anchor, stampede, mass movement, large-scale events). Rest in the sense of lying down, doing nothing, either through illness, death, vacation, or unemployment. Doing nothing is caused by external factors that are considered a constraint. Unrest shows itself in major events that bring masses of people together: social commemorations, music events, war.
- Conceal (locksmith). That which lies behind the border or which one hides from attackers.
- Embrace. Not a loving embrace, but clamping down on property to protect it from robbers (see also Haggler and Conceal). Stuffed bag, or suitcase, money handle, safe.
- Contamination (dirt, rag, feet, contact with the ground). Contamination by touching contaminated objects, such as the ground, a sick person or a corpse. Contamination of the earth, of our bodies resulting in disease, of the social and cultural body.
Keywords classified in the DSD under the black-on-blue code are:
- assault, attack, biting, abandoned, curse, rancor, theft, thief
- ancestor, forefather, body, coffin, final resting, death, the end, grave, urn, graveyard, underground, undertaker, serious, secret, mystery, depressed, old age, disease, sick
- bill, costly
- border, boundary, bounded, beggar, wasteland
- tightwad
- mass movement
- concealing, digging, haze
- embrace, filled
- contamination, dirt, footprint (dirty), rag, waste, shoes
I. Michiels (red.)
Semanticus F. Alpaerts suggests in De Denkbeeldige Ruimte (1980) that the I Ching or Book of Changes, originating from mythical antiquity, is the first semantic lexicon of mankind. In this Chinese classic, unquestionably one of the most influential books in the world’s literature, 64 chapters are coded with a double triplet line code called hexagrams.
Alpaerts used the Wilhelm (1971) translation to show a possible connection between the code lines from the I Ching and the codon encoding in the Semantic Colour Space. The open (- -) and closed (—) lines from the I Ching correspond with respectively the 0’s and 1’s from his semantic coding system. This way he could associate the concepts described in the 64 chapters of the I Ching, with the eight primary colours and their combinations (8×8) from his classification. Later, his hypothesis was confirmed by a comparative research he conducted on the similarities between his keyword-colour classifications, in which the concepts from the I Ching form an important part, and the empirical data from sociologist Eva Heller’s word-to-colour association study (Alpaerts, 1993).
The following list includes I Ching chapter titles with links to pages in the DSD (between brackets: if the title is not in the DSD, a synonym), chapter numbers, digital coding (hexagram), and colour combinations.
| chapter title | chapters | hexagram | colour combination |
|---|---|---|---|
| creative heaven | 1 | 111:111 | YL:YL |
| the receptive | 2 | 000:000 | BL:BL |
| difficulty at the beginning | 3 | 010:001 | GR:BK |
| youthful folly (inexperienced, foolish) | 4 | 100:010 | BR:GR |
| waiting | 5 | 010:111 | GR:YL |
| the fight | 6 | 111:010 | YL:GR |
| the army | 7 | 000:010 | BL:GR |
| the all-encompassing | 8 | 010:000 | GR:BL |
| the taming power of the small (newborn) | 9 | 110:111 | WH:YL |
| performing | 10 | 111:011 | YL:PL |
| peace | 11 | 000:111 | BL:YL |
| standstill (stagnation, blocking) | 12 | 111:000 | YL:BL |
| fellowship with men (together, community) | 13 | 111:101 | YL:RD |
| great possessing (imperium) | 14 | 101:111 | RD:YL |
| humbling | 15 | 000:100 | BL:BR |
| rage (rancor, attack) | 16 | 001:000 | BK:BL |
| pursue | 17 | 011:001 | PS:BK |
| correcting (addressing) | 18 | 100:110 | BR:WH |
| nearing, rapprochement | 19 | 000:011 | BL:PL |
| viewing (perception) | 20 | 110:000 | WH:BL |
| biting through (stick-it-out) | 21 | 101:001 | RD:BK |
| adorning (embellish) | 22 | 100:101 | BR:RD |
| splitting apart (slivering) | 23 | 100:000 | BR:BL |
| the turning point | 24 | 000:001 | BL:BK |
| innocence | 25 | 111:001 | YL:BK |
| the taming power of the great (steering) | 26 | 100:111 | BR:YL |
| the corners of the mouth, providing nourishment (feeding, grooming, open mouth) | 27 | 100:001 | BR:BK |
| great exceeding (overloaded) | 28 | 011:110 | PL:WH |
| the abyss | 29 | 010:010 | GR:GR |
| the clinging, fire (flame, attach) | 30 | 101:101 | RD:RD |
| influence, wooing (courtship) | 31 | 011:100 | PL:BR |
| duration, constancy | 32 | 001:110 | BK:WH |
| retreat | 33 | 111:100 | YL:BR |
| the power of the great (powerful) | 34 | 001:111 | BK:YL |
| progress | 35 | 101:000 | RD:BL |
| darkening of the Light (hiding) | 36 | 000:101 | BL:RD |
| family | 37 | 110:101 | WH:RD |
| polarising (contrasts) | 38 | 101:011 | RD:PL |
| obstruction | 39 | 010:100 | GR:BR |
| liberation | 40 | 001:010 | BK:GR |
| reduction | 41 | 100:011 | BR:PL |
| increase, beneficial, useful (growth, functional) | 42 | 110:001 | WH:BK |
| resoluteness, determination | 43 | 011:111 | PL:YL |
| meeting | 44 | 111:110 | YL:WH |
| gathering together, massing (assemble) | 45 | 011:000 | PL:BL |
| pushing upward | 46 | 000:110 | BL:WH |
| oppression, exhaustion (depletion, sucked out) | 47 | 011:010 | PL:GR |
| the well | 48 | 010:110 | GR:WH |
| revolution, moulting | 49 | 011:101 | PL:RD |
| the cauldron (terrine) | 50 | 101:110 | RD:WH |
| the arousing, shock, thunder | 51 | 001:001 | BK:BK |
| keeping still, mountain (still, not moving) | 52 | 100:100 | BR:BR |
| development, gradual progress | 53 | 110:100 | WH:BR |
| the marrying maiden (concubine) | 54 | 001:011 | BK:PL |
| abundance, fullness | 55 | 001:101 | BK:RD |
| the wanderer, travelling (wanderlust) | 56 | 101:100 | RD:BR |
| the penetrating, wind | 57 | 110:110 | WH:WH |
| the joyous, lake (gay) | 58 | 011:011 | PL:PL |
| dispersion, dissolution, (scattering) | 59 | 110:010 | WH:GR |
| limitation, moderation (delimitation, restriction) | 60 | 010:011 | GR:PL |
| inner truth | 61 | 110:011 | WH:PL |
| preponderance of the small (unremarkable, incompetent) | 62 | 001:100 | BK:BR |
| after completion | 63 | 010:101 | GR:RD |
| before completion | 64 | 101:010 | RD:GR |