#basic colour terms

-> by Berlin and Kay (1969) 

Colour categories are a great example for language universals, as well as for prototypes. 

First off, each language has independently developed different words for colours and is therefore an example for universals in all languages. However, do all languages identify the same colours? 

This is where prototype categories come into play. Usually, there is one optimal example for each colour category (a ‘prototype’), e.g. the reddest red, the greenest green, etc. However, the boundaries of these colour categories are quite blurred.

Take the chart below. Which of these colours would you sort into the category ‘blue’ and which into the category ‘green’? Are there colours where you’re unsure? Where do you draw the line?

That is basically what Berlin and Kay did in their experiment / research. They compared the colour term vocabulary of 98 different languages (they focused on the typical elements of a category, not just on the category boundaries). The participants were asked to name the basic colour terms of their native language and to identify the focal points and boundaries of each of these words on a Munsell chart like the one above.

The colour terms had to be monoleximic (not ‘lemon-colored’, ‘blue-green’, etc.), no extensions (e.g. ‘crimson’ and ‘scarlet’ are both included in ‘red’), they must not be restricted to a narrow class of objects (e.g. not ‘blond’), and they have to be psychologically salient for informants (e.g. not ‘bluish’). 

Results 

-> from 1969

the test persons were very consistent in the identification of prototypes, but not so much in the identification of category boundaries 

the number of basic colour terms is between 2 and 11/12

if a language has 11 basic colour terms, then the categories are: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple, and grey

examples for languages with 11 or 12 basic colour terms: Arabic, English, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian (12), Hungarian (12), Zuni, Korean, etc.

if a language has less than 11 basic colour terms, then there are clear limitations on which categories it may encode -> these can be described by 7 implicative universals: 

all languages have words for ‘white’ and ‘black’

if a language has 3 colour terms, then it has a word for ‘red’

if a language has 4 colour terms, then it either has a word for ‘green’ or for ‘yellow’

.....

All languages follow this similar 7 stage pattern / development for colour terms: 

Evolution of colour vocabulary:

all languages start with two colour terms

new colour terms are added over time

11 colour terms are the maximum

Later revisions:

grey can emerge earlier than at stage 7, sometimes already at stage 3 (e.g. Mandarin, Hopi, Tsonga)

some languages don’t distinguish ‘green’ and ‘blue’, but have words for later colours like ‘brown’ (e.g. Bantu languages)

only 6 salient perceptual landmarks (rather than 11): black, white, red, green, blue, yellow (vast majority of basic color terms in all languages denote one or several of these six primary colors) 

the terms in the two-color systems do not simply denote ‘black’ and ‘white’, but they partition the entire color space (e.g. Dani (language from Papua/New Guinea): partition of the color space into ”warm” and “cool” colors)

next to the six primary colors there are derived color categories (so-called fuzzy intersection) and composite basic categories (like “warm colors”): e.g. orange = red ∩ yellow, warm = red ∪ yellow

every color category system partitions the entire color space -> evolutionary sequences move from coarser to finer partitions

.

Sources: 

http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~gjaeger/lehre/ws0910/languagesOfTheWorld/colors.pdf

https://grahamshawcross.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/colourprecedence.jpg