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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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