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Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution
The work reported in this monograph was begun in the winter of 1967 in a graduate seminar at Berkeley. Many of the basic data were gathered by members of the seminar and the theoretical framework presented here was initially developed in the context of the seminar discussions. Much has been discovered since1969, the date of original publication, regarding the psychophysical and neurophysical determinants of universal, cross-linguistic constraints on the shape of basic color lexicons, and something, albeit less, can now also be said with some confidence regarding the constraining effects of these language-independent processes of color perception and conceptualization on the direction of evolution of basic color term lexicons.
210 pages, Paperback
First published October 28, 1969
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January 30, 2014
Every so often, ever since Protagoras in the 5th Century BC, there pops up the spectre of extreme relativism, the notion that man (or woman) is the “measure of all things” and that human knowledge is nothing but a human creation. And in response, an opponent usually appears to put relativism back in its box.
Basic Color Terms is a modern classic of linguistic theory based on experimental data. It is an assault on the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it places limits on cultural relativism. Despite the apparent austerity of both the topic and its presentation, this book lucidly shows that people of all cultures share a basic, if restricted, commonality of experience that expressible in any language and able to be translated from one language to another.
Before 1969, most anthropologists and linguists accepted the relativistic view - associated with the names of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf - that each language categorizes the objects of the world in a manner peculiar only to that language. According to this view, the categorization provided by a particular language determines how members of a given linguistic community perceive and understand the world.
The Sapir-Wharf hypothesis did indeed seem to account for important data. A very plausible example was supposed to be colour terminology. I had experience of this myself. In 1969, I went to live among Yoruba people in Nigeria, soon discovering that the Yoruba language has only three basic colour terms, usually glossed as “white”, ”black”, and ”red”. Objects which in English are said to be “blue” or “green” are all identified in Yoruba by the term “dúdú” whose core meaning is “black”. “Yellow” or “brown” objects were said by Yoruba speakers to be “red” (pupa). Yoruba speakers competent in English often had surprising difficulty using English words like “yellow”, “blue” and “green” that did not have direct Yoruba equivalents. Moreover, it was clear that in fields such as folk medicine and religion, where colours had both practical and symbolic significance, such colours as “blue”, “black” and “green”, which in English are distinct, were often treated in Yoruba as being “the same colour”. The idea that the perception of colour was determined by linguistic convention therefore had considerable traction.
Nevertheless, Berlin and Kay challenged the extreme linguistic determinism and relativism of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. They showed there are indeed semantic universals in colour terms, and, by implication, (and as subsequent research showed) in other fields as well. As they said, “We suspect that this allegation of total arbitrariness in the way languages segment the color space is a gross overstatement.”
For the purpose of conducting their experiments, they asked the paint company, Munsell, to provide 329 coloured chips representing a very wide range of different colours including blacks, whites and greys. Informants were asked first to name the basic colours found in their own native language. Then, for any given colour term “x“, these informants had to identify all those chips which under any conditions they would call “x”. Finally, they had to identify the best, most typical examples of “x”.
Crucial here is the notion of a “basic” colour term. Every language has an indefinitely large number of expressions that denote colour, but only some of these are basic terms. According to Berlin and Kay, basic colour terms are those that do not derive their meaning from the meaning of the expression’s parts: so “lemon-coloured” and “salmon-coloured”, for example, are not basic terms. Basic terms are never a subset of another term: so, for example, “scarlet” and “crimson” are not basic terms because they are varieties of “red”. A term is not basic if it used to describe only a narrow class of objects: “blonde”, for example, is used to describe beer, hair and complexion but little else. And basic terms must be psychologically salient for informants.
A surprising conclusion of their interviews is that, while some languages have more basic colour terms than others (some have only two; some, like Yoruba, have three; and others, such as English, have eleven), these are always drawn from the same list of eleven basic colour terms, namely, white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey.
Even more surprising are the following rules that can be extrapolated from the data.
1. All languages contain terms for black and white.
2. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
3.. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
4. If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
5. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
6. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
7. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains a term for purple, pink, orange, grey, or some combination of these.
The authors also suggest that the validity of these rules implies an evolutionary process according to which languages become progressively more sophisticated by adding an additional term in a regular sequence.
Importantly too, “good examples” or archetypes of any given colour are closely similar in all languages. There is fuzziness at the boundaries of any given category, so informants may not be sure whether, for example, to call a particular bluey-green “blue” or “green”. However, whenever a particular basic colour term exists in a language, “good examples” of that basic colour are always the same as in all other languages. Indeed, small variations between informants about what constitutes a good example of a particular colour varies no more between speakers of different languages than between speakers of the same languages.
The far-reaching implication of this study is that one should beware of an excessive enthusiasm for cultural relativism. On the contrary, it seems that there is a basic level where the universal physical human experience of (in this case) colour determines how colours are encoded in speech. At this basic level, it is not semantic categories that determine what we see. Rather, what we see determines our semantic categories. More than this, human beings, of whatever culture or linguistic group, when they see the same objects, share a huge common physical experience of those objects. This shared experience largely determines at a basic level how they all talk about this same world.
Later research derived from Berlin and Kay, notably that of Eleanor Rosch, has shown that, while there are undoubtedly semantic categories of high and low abstraction ruled by relativistic cultural considerations, there does seem to be a basic middle level of abstraction where human experience – and the words people use - have a high degree of universality. It seems plain that cultures, ideologies and systems of knowledge differ between peoples, affecting how they see the world. Nevertheless, it also seems plain that human understanding is always based on a common basic capacity to see the same world, a facility that at least allows different peoples to communicate, to criticise each others' ideas and to compare notes.
Basic Color Terms is a modern classic of linguistic theory based on experimental data. It is an assault on the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it places limits on cultural relativism. Despite the apparent austerity of both the topic and its presentation, this book lucidly shows that people of all cultures share a basic, if restricted, commonality of experience that expressible in any language and able to be translated from one language to another.
Before 1969, most anthropologists and linguists accepted the relativistic view - associated with the names of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf - that each language categorizes the objects of the world in a manner peculiar only to that language. According to this view, the categorization provided by a particular language determines how members of a given linguistic community perceive and understand the world.
The Sapir-Wharf hypothesis did indeed seem to account for important data. A very plausible example was supposed to be colour terminology. I had experience of this myself. In 1969, I went to live among Yoruba people in Nigeria, soon discovering that the Yoruba language has only three basic colour terms, usually glossed as “white”, ”black”, and ”red”. Objects which in English are said to be “blue” or “green” are all identified in Yoruba by the term “dúdú” whose core meaning is “black”. “Yellow” or “brown” objects were said by Yoruba speakers to be “red” (pupa). Yoruba speakers competent in English often had surprising difficulty using English words like “yellow”, “blue” and “green” that did not have direct Yoruba equivalents. Moreover, it was clear that in fields such as folk medicine and religion, where colours had both practical and symbolic significance, such colours as “blue”, “black” and “green”, which in English are distinct, were often treated in Yoruba as being “the same colour”. The idea that the perception of colour was determined by linguistic convention therefore had considerable traction.
Nevertheless, Berlin and Kay challenged the extreme linguistic determinism and relativism of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. They showed there are indeed semantic universals in colour terms, and, by implication, (and as subsequent research showed) in other fields as well. As they said, “We suspect that this allegation of total arbitrariness in the way languages segment the color space is a gross overstatement.”
For the purpose of conducting their experiments, they asked the paint company, Munsell, to provide 329 coloured chips representing a very wide range of different colours including blacks, whites and greys. Informants were asked first to name the basic colours found in their own native language. Then, for any given colour term “x“, these informants had to identify all those chips which under any conditions they would call “x”. Finally, they had to identify the best, most typical examples of “x”.
Crucial here is the notion of a “basic” colour term. Every language has an indefinitely large number of expressions that denote colour, but only some of these are basic terms. According to Berlin and Kay, basic colour terms are those that do not derive their meaning from the meaning of the expression’s parts: so “lemon-coloured” and “salmon-coloured”, for example, are not basic terms. Basic terms are never a subset of another term: so, for example, “scarlet” and “crimson” are not basic terms because they are varieties of “red”. A term is not basic if it used to describe only a narrow class of objects: “blonde”, for example, is used to describe beer, hair and complexion but little else. And basic terms must be psychologically salient for informants.
A surprising conclusion of their interviews is that, while some languages have more basic colour terms than others (some have only two; some, like Yoruba, have three; and others, such as English, have eleven), these are always drawn from the same list of eleven basic colour terms, namely, white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey.
Even more surprising are the following rules that can be extrapolated from the data.
1. All languages contain terms for black and white.
2. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
3.. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
4. If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
5. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
6. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
7. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains a term for purple, pink, orange, grey, or some combination of these.
The authors also suggest that the validity of these rules implies an evolutionary process according to which languages become progressively more sophisticated by adding an additional term in a regular sequence.
Importantly too, “good examples” or archetypes of any given colour are closely similar in all languages. There is fuzziness at the boundaries of any given category, so informants may not be sure whether, for example, to call a particular bluey-green “blue” or “green”. However, whenever a particular basic colour term exists in a language, “good examples” of that basic colour are always the same as in all other languages. Indeed, small variations between informants about what constitutes a good example of a particular colour varies no more between speakers of different languages than between speakers of the same languages.
The far-reaching implication of this study is that one should beware of an excessive enthusiasm for cultural relativism. On the contrary, it seems that there is a basic level where the universal physical human experience of (in this case) colour determines how colours are encoded in speech. At this basic level, it is not semantic categories that determine what we see. Rather, what we see determines our semantic categories. More than this, human beings, of whatever culture or linguistic group, when they see the same objects, share a huge common physical experience of those objects. This shared experience largely determines at a basic level how they all talk about this same world.
Later research derived from Berlin and Kay, notably that of Eleanor Rosch, has shown that, while there are undoubtedly semantic categories of high and low abstraction ruled by relativistic cultural considerations, there does seem to be a basic middle level of abstraction where human experience – and the words people use - have a high degree of universality. It seems plain that cultures, ideologies and systems of knowledge differ between peoples, affecting how they see the world. Nevertheless, it also seems plain that human understanding is always based on a common basic capacity to see the same world, a facility that at least allows different peoples to communicate, to criticise each others' ideas and to compare notes.
November 14, 2010
Davvero interessante.
Leggo qua
http://www.anobii.com/books/012dcdf5c...
(alla voce «Colore») che le conclusioni di questo studio del 1969 (l’esistenza di universali semantici per quanto riguarda i termini di colore e di una sequenza evolutiva nell’elaborazione di questi termini) sono state confermate da studi più recenti. Al di là di questo, è affascinante vedere da vicino i metodi di una ricerca scientifica nel campo delle scienze umane e la “lentezza”, la “prudenza”, l’“attenzione” nel trarre conclusioni.
Notevoli gli squarci di “vecchia ricerca”, con l’intreccio di buffi pregiudizi e strabilianti conclusioni: «si efectivamente la percepción de los colores se ha obtenido de modo gradual, el hombre de provenir podrá percibir los colores que come el ultravioleta son hoy invisibles y cuya existencia sólo conocemos por las propiedades químicas que poseen», sosteneva nel 1924 Carlos Cuervo Marquez, citato a p. 79. Come dire che i “superpoteri” sono teorizzati a partire dall’analisi delle nostre limitate capacità… ;-)
Leggo qua
http://www.anobii.com/books/012dcdf5c...
(alla voce «Colore») che le conclusioni di questo studio del 1969 (l’esistenza di universali semantici per quanto riguarda i termini di colore e di una sequenza evolutiva nell’elaborazione di questi termini) sono state confermate da studi più recenti. Al di là di questo, è affascinante vedere da vicino i metodi di una ricerca scientifica nel campo delle scienze umane e la “lentezza”, la “prudenza”, l’“attenzione” nel trarre conclusioni.
Notevoli gli squarci di “vecchia ricerca”, con l’intreccio di buffi pregiudizi e strabilianti conclusioni: «si efectivamente la percepción de los colores se ha obtenido de modo gradual, el hombre de provenir podrá percibir los colores que come el ultravioleta son hoy invisibles y cuya existencia sólo conocemos por las propiedades químicas que poseen», sosteneva nel 1924 Carlos Cuervo Marquez, citato a p. 79. Come dire che i “superpoteri” sono teorizzati a partire dall’analisi delle nostre limitate capacità… ;-)
Read
November 16, 2021a must for colour terms study. helpful for my essay on the term blue. thanks!
January 27, 2024
The authors of the study are native English speakers. Berlin, is an anthropologist. He and Kay worked primarily with other anthropologists and ethnolinguists to report on various languages usage of color terms. At no point did they speak with native speakers of languages who also happen to be experts in colors. By experts, I mean anyone who works with color on a regular basis: artists or people who make dyes, etc.
The second obvious bias is towards western languages. English as the authors' native language gets a pass and is slotted in amongst the most advanced. English — a language notorious for borrowing words. But it's given a pass because the words were borrowed longer ago than other languages when English/Spanish/French introduced their words into the languages of the people they conquered. If English gets a pass on borrowing "orange" and "blue" for instance, so should any other language.
http://pussreboots.com/blog/2024/comm...
The second obvious bias is towards western languages. English as the authors' native language gets a pass and is slotted in amongst the most advanced. English — a language notorious for borrowing words. But it's given a pass because the words were borrowed longer ago than other languages when English/Spanish/French introduced their words into the languages of the people they conquered. If English gets a pass on borrowing "orange" and "blue" for instance, so should any other language.
http://pussreboots.com/blog/2024/comm...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 3, 2025
Dit blijft zo fascinerend!
August 9, 2024
For anyone interested in linguistic color theory, this is a must-read
Read
November 3, 2010The variety of facts about color language uncovered in this study demanding some kind of explanation is boggling. Why is there a specific order in which color terms appear in different languages? Why is there no language in which blue or green or yellow appears but not red? Why are the boundaries of color terms so unstable when the focal colors are so stable (both between subjects and within the same subject over time)? And so on.
And it's a shock for someone who hasn't done a degree in linguistics to see the sheer variety of human languages on display. In a long section of the book, B&K offer short notes on the 90 languages they considered in their literature survey of color terms, and reveal facts like the following: in a 1897 study of Somali, it is reported that "the term for 'blue' is madow'adan, literally 'black whiteness'" (p.66).
I think this is the place to begin the difficult study of lexical semantics, and the insane complexity of what constitutes the meaning of words. B&K suggest the direction such an inquiry might go at the end of the summary of their results:
"The study of the biological foundations of the most peculiarly and exclusively human set of behavior abilities--language--is just beginning, but sufficient evidence has already accumulated to show that such connections must exist for the linguistic realms of syntax and phonology. The findings reported here concerning the universality and evolution of [the] basic color lexicon suggest that such connections are also to be found in the realm of semantics" (p.110).
And it's a shock for someone who hasn't done a degree in linguistics to see the sheer variety of human languages on display. In a long section of the book, B&K offer short notes on the 90 languages they considered in their literature survey of color terms, and reveal facts like the following: in a 1897 study of Somali, it is reported that "the term for 'blue' is madow'adan, literally 'black whiteness'" (p.66).
I think this is the place to begin the difficult study of lexical semantics, and the insane complexity of what constitutes the meaning of words. B&K suggest the direction such an inquiry might go at the end of the summary of their results:
"The study of the biological foundations of the most peculiarly and exclusively human set of behavior abilities--language--is just beginning, but sufficient evidence has already accumulated to show that such connections must exist for the linguistic realms of syntax and phonology. The findings reported here concerning the universality and evolution of [the] basic color lexicon suggest that such connections are also to be found in the realm of semantics" (p.110).
September 16, 2017
This book is the best argument against reductionist, binary adherence to cultural determinism or perceptual absolutes.
July 8, 2015
Amazing findings-- only wish they provided a more thorough explanation for the lack color specific words in certain regions.
January 7, 2020
A big one for me.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews