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Research
on Colour Words
According to Berlin and Kay (1969)
'Basic Color Terms, their Universality and Evolution'
There are 11 basic colour terms in English:
red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink,
brown, grey, black and white.
Languages evolved from having only 2 basic colour terms, and gradually
added more over time until they reached a maximum of 11 basic terms.
An edited version of "Some apparent uniformities
between languages in colour-naming" by Robin Allott. 1974
summarises Berlin and Kay as follows:
Current doctrine in linguistics and anthropology holds
that each language and culture expresses a unique world view by its particular
way of slicing up reality into named categories. (See
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).
This says that it is difficult to make exact translations between languages
because hearers see the world in a way governed by their own language.
Colour vocabulary is a possible example of this.
According to accepted doctrine, basic colour words are not translatable
across languages.
Analysing ninety-eight languages Berlin and Kay found that eleven colours
words act as focal points of all the basic colour words in all the languages
of the world. This set of eleven seems therefore to be a semantic
universal. Basic colour words are translatable.
They also found that words for the basic colours arose in different languages
in a regular sequence:
• all languages with only two basic colour words have words for
black and white;
• languages with exactly three basic colour words have words for
black, white and red and so on.
Although this has been modified by later research the
basic principle remains. Berlin and Kay interpreted this as a demonstration
of language evolution.
They grouped the ninety-eight languages studied into
seven stages of an evolutionary sequence running from primitive languages
with words only for WHITE and BLACK to more advanced languages with words
for the whole range of colours. The classification was as follows:
| WHITE
BLACK |
Stage I |
| 9 languages: |
7 New Guinea 1 Congo 1 South India |
WHITE BLACK
RED
|
Stage II |
| 21 languages: |
2 Amerindian 16 African 1 Pacific 1 Australian Aboriginal 1 South
India |
| WHITE BLACK RED
GREEN |
Stage IIIa |
| 8 languages: |
6 African 1 Philippine 1 New Guinea |
| WHITE BLACK RED
YELLOW |
Stage IlIb |
| 9 languages: |
2 Australian Aboriginal 1 Philippine 3 Polynesian 1 Greek (Homeric)
2 African |
| WHITE BLACK RED
GREEN YELLOW
|
Stage IV |
| 18 languages: |
12 Amerindian 1 Sumatra 4 African 1 Eskimo |
| WHITE BLACK RED
GREEN YELLOW
BLUE |
Stage V |
| 8 languages: |
5 African 1 Chinese 1 Philippine 1 South India |
| WHITE BLACK RED
GREEN YELLOW
BLUE BROWN |
Stage VI |
| 5 languages: |
2 African 1 Sumatra 1 South India 1 Amerindian |
| COMPLETE ARRAY OF COLOURS
|
Stage VII |
| 20 languages: |
1 Arabic 2 Malayan 6 European 1 Chinese 1 Indian 2 African 1 Hebrew
1 Japanese 1 Korean 2 South East Asian 1 Amerindian 1 Philippine |
However Berlin and Kaye's work has been criticised,
for example in "Revisiting
Basic Color Terms" by Barbara Saunders who claims that Berlin
and Kaye's work is fundamentally flawed.
In one of her less wordy paragraphs Saunders says:
| "Though Berlin and Kay insist their tests
were 'empirical', it is worth looking at them more closely. There
were labelling, transcription and factual errors, empirical deficiencies
in the experiments, a language sample that was not random, and a bilingual
and colonial factor that was ignored. The informants were narrowly
homogenous, often with one bilingual speaker for each of nineteen
language, all foreign students, presumably at Berkeley (Rosch 1972).26.
Finally, fifteen of the twenty mapped languages were at Evolutionary
Stage Seven, meaning that B&K's hardest datum - the universal
clustering of foci - was a foregone conclusion." |
A correspondent to this author says:
... those eleven [basic colour terms] aren't universal.
Probably not even
within the ninety-eight languages they studied, since the Chinese
language they studied is most likely Mandarin or Cantonese. In
Mandarin the word for red is 'hong se' and for pink is 'fen hong se'.
'fen' is a kind of diminutive, also appearing in the word for minute
(the measure of time) 'fen zhong'. In my opinion that very clearly
is
not a basic color term, and so 'Chinese' does not in fact fit into
the European 11-color system. |
It's also worth noting that the phrase "complete
range of colours" is meaningless unless precisely defined. Colour
identification is partly physiological (most humans can naturally "see"
the full spectrum) and partly cultural / linguistic (individual colours
are given specific terms that apply to a "focus" point on the
spectrum and may be applied to a narrow range of the spectrum. However
these imprecise ranges may omit whole areas of the spectrum which can
only be described vaguely as "greeny-yellow" or qualified as
"darkish blue-green." Obviously while there can be an infinite
number of colours in the visible spectrum it would be impossible to have
an infinite number of words for them. On the other hand paint manufacturers
try hard to produce highly descriptive
colour terms using connotations and metaphor.
Michael Minnich suggests: "It's not simply cultural
and it's not simply observational. It seems to have some relationship
to language itself, something like grammatical
gender or case marking."
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