colorful surnames

[rone]

In English, we have Black, White, Brown, and Green.  There are many people in Asia and of Asian descent with the surname Tan, but that's just a coincidence.  Vermeil is a bright shade of red in French, Purpura refers to a dye from a mollusc.  What other surnames am i missing?

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I wonder if we can profile this by language? Color-related names seem to be particularly common in English and German, less so in some other languages.

[cheesetruck.livejournal.com]

Or language group - Indo-European (and various subareas - Romance, Germanic, and I'm afraid I don't know what groupings the Hindi or Farsi lanaguages would be in) vs. Finno-Urgic - and whether this then extends to just 'Western' languages or if it holds for others.

I'll ask a Hungarian friend if it's common there, and see if any Dutch/Norwegian/Svensk folks have any idea about it.

Norwegian friend reports that he's never seen a color used as a last name ALONE, followed by a discussion of 'Brunes' and whether that's really a color or not (: ('Brown' 'small peninsula' (which I am thinking there is a Finnish word 'lahti' which works here but not an English word.))

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Swedish has "Grön" as a surname, at least. "Röd" makes me think of Viking names. It's not really used any longer as far as I know. "Svart" (black) seems to be another archaic name no longer used.

Can't really think of any others, though.