# red



## Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Is there a Finnish word which corresponds colour red, which is "deep" in shades?

Perhaps, erittäin punainen?


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## Grumpy Old Man

I think you want _tummanpunainen. _


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## fennofiili

I’m not sure how well the metaphors match, but Finnish uses the genitive attribute “syvän” to indicate intensity of colour. _Kielitoimiston sanakirja_ describes s.v. syvä:

“*4.* eril. aistivaikutelmia kuvaamassa. [...]
*b.* väreistä: voimakas, hehkuva. _Meren__syvä__sini__. __Syvän__sininen__taivas__. __Poskilla__hehkui__syvä__puna__.”_


_Nykysuomen sanakirja_ mentions the compound “syvänpunainen”, too, but with an annotation that means that it is usually written as two words: “syvän punainen”.

“Erittäin punainen” would sound odd to my ear. You could say “vahvan punainen” or “voimakkaan punainen”, but “syvän punainen” appears to be the normal expression, and standard language, in spite of being based on foreign models.


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## thenestasmile

If you wanted to translate that word to word, it would be "syvänpunainen". Although I would only use that in written, specifically descriptive language.

A more common way to describe a deep color is to add the word "tumma", in this case like "tummanpunainen". I don't know if you mean that the color is dark or that it's just figuratively deep. 

"Syvänpunainen" doesn't define whether the color is dark or not, but "tummanpunainen" goes for both deep and dark. 

At least "erittäin punainen" defines neither of those; it would mean that the color is in a way very full and remarkably red. That means that "erittäin punainen" would be used only when wanting to emphasize the fact of the object being red.


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## fennofiili

fennofiili said:


> “*4.* eril. aistivaikutelmia kuvaamassa. [...]
> *b.* väreistä: voimakas, hehkuva. _Meren__syvä__sini__. __Syvän__sininen__taivas__. __Poskilla__hehkui__syvä__puna__.”_



Oops. Copy and paste failed. The italicized examples should read _Meren syvä sini. Syvän sininen taivas. Poskilla hehkui syvä puna_. 

(I don’t understand why the spaces were lost. It may relate to the somewhat odd markup on the dictionary page.)


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## fennofiili

thenestasmile said:


> A more common way to describe a deep color is to add the word "tumma", in this case like "tummanpunainen".



“Tummanpunainen” is dark red. That’s a different dimension. Darkness refers to small amount of light, whereas deepness relates to the wavelength distribution.



> I don't know if you mean that the color is dark or that it's just figuratively deep.



Deep red need not be dark. I cannot imagine what “figuratively” means here.



> "Syvänpunainen" doesn't define whether the color is dark or not,



Indeed.



> but "tummanpunainen" goes for both deep and dark.



No, it means dark red. Whatever the difference between deep and dark is, it probably maps rather directly to the difference between “syvän” and “tumman”.



> At least "erittäin punainen" defines neither of those; it would mean that the color is in a way very full and remarkably red. That means that "erittäin punainen" would be used only when wanting to emphasize the fact of the object being red.



The phrase “erittäin punainen” appears to have some use, but it looks artificial to me. It’s like trying to say that something is red in a red way without actually saying in which sense. To say that something is really red (near the pure red of the spectrum) rather than just something often called red (like you might say that a person has read hair), I would probably use “tulenpunainen” (which literally means red like a fire).


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## Spongiformi

fennofiili said:


> The phrase “erittäin punainen” appears to have some use, but it looks artificial to me. It’s like trying to say that something is red in a red way without actually saying in which sense. To say that something is really red (near the pure red of the spectrum) rather than just something often called red (like you might say that a person has read hair), I would probably use “tulenpunainen” (which literally means red like a fire).



Indeed. In my opinion _"erittäin punainen"_ doesn't refer to any particular shade of red (although it might exclude "kind of reddish" colours) . It merely means something was totally red, I'd say.

A: "Levyn pitäisi kuumentuessaan muuttua punaiseksi. Oliko se punainen?"
B: "Erittäin punainen."


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