The role of color words in the construction of Toponymy in Iran

Toponymy is the science of studying the names of geographical places, and its purpose is to investigate geographical names in order to find their origin, meaning and structure? In the geographical names of Iran, color-words such as: white (Aq), red, green, blue, yellow (Zarin), black (Qara), are common. How is it possible that the tree is black and the spring is yellow and the soil is white? The question of this research is, what is the role of color-words in the construction of Iranian place names? The corpus of names that have been examined in this research are mostly obtained from the national statistics portal of Iran and in few cases from other sources. The result shows that one of the most frequent features in the construction of place names is the use of color words. The color of the soil, or the surface of the land, the color of plants and flowers, as well as their different effects from a distance (such as the dark or green color of the sea), the color of metals and minerals, have caused the people of each society to consider the appearance of each for the first time to name it. The method used in this research is comparative, That is, the names of different provinces with different languages and dialects have been compared with each other.