Lojban has twelve basic color terms. these ten mean exactly the same as English's:

  • blabi white

  • grusi gray

  • xekri black

  • xunre red

  • crino green

  • pelxu yellow

  • blanu blue

  • zirpu purple

  • bunre brown

  • narju orange

but there are two other terms whose usage might be a little more complicated or controversial — nukni and cicna. I'll discuss both in this post, but first I want to talk about nukni, which has a somewhat unhelpful dictionary definition:

x1 is magenta/fuchsia/purplish-red [color adjective].

"magenta" and "fuchsia" are more or less the same color (they describe vaguely the same range; as HTML colors, both fuchsia and magenta refer to #ff00ff). when I see "purplish-red", though, I think of a different shade for some reason — a darker color, a tad lighter than the color of red wine.

I think we could broaden this existing term, nukni, to cover some more of the color space. simply put, nukni is the Lojban word for pink. in my own Lojban, I call almost everything I would call pink nukni.

there are two other Lojban words often used for "pink", though: labyxu'e (literally 'white-red') and the unofficial root word penka. labyxu'e does have its place, but I think it refers to something more specific, and a little different than 'pink':

see how the color shown here doesn't have any blue in it? it's just red, but lighter. I think this is the prototypical labyxu'e. (if it's even lighter than this, you might even reverse the order of the compound, and say it's xunblabi.)

as for penka, I think its existence kind of defeats the purpose of the word nukni — since 'pink' is more deserving of a root word than 'magenta'. 'magenta', as I see it, should have its own word, but it should be a compound, not its own root. using penka for the more basic 'pink' kind of sidelines nukni to be something that's way too specific for a short root word like this. (all that said though, I don't think penka is a bad word — if you use it for 'pink', that's fine, I just prefer broadening nukni.)

anyway, you might be asking yourself

if nukni is pink, what are we supposed to say when we specifically mean magenta?

and I think this is an excellent point. 'magenta' is quite a broad term, but I think the prototypical #ff00ff web magenta (or the printer-ink kind) could be called camnukni — 'saturated-pink'.1

now let's move on to cicna. the problem with cicna is not its definition ("turquoise, cyan, greenish-blue" is very clear), but the fact that it's not used as much as it should be.

cicna is one of the twelve root words for colors. the fact that it gets to be in this privileged group of twelve, instead of something like 'beige', makes me think that cicna is a basic color term — that is, the distinction between cicna and blanu 'blue' or crino 'green' in Lojban is as basic as the distinction between 'blue' and 'green' in English, or 'yellow' and 'orange'.

you can also see how Lojban treats cyan in the days of the week.2 one of them is named after the color cyan — cicnydei is Thursday, which is different from ri'ordei 'Wednesday', the "green" day, and bladei 'Friday', the "blue" day. in a way this implies that the "cultural Lojban rainbow" has cicna as one of its base colors. (cyan is a way more useful color to have than whatever the English cultural rainbow does — indigo? come on…)

it might be easier to explain this with an image. the blue + green range of the color space in Lojban is (IMO) more or less divided like this:

and here's some objects I would describe as cicna instead of blanu, even though I would definitely call these "blue" in English (except for the vase):

in western comic book order, these are a Southern Song–dynasty vase, a picture of the sea with some equally cicna fish, American robin eggs, and a (saturated) picture of the planet Uranus.3

my tip for really feeling the blanu–cicna distinction is looking at "blue" things around you, as you go about your life, and categorizing them as either blanu or cicna. after some time doing this, the distinction will feel as natural to you as 'orange' and 'yellow' — and in my opinion, the distinction is pretty important in Lojban!