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Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution: 01/26/24

Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution

Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969) began during a graduate seminar at U.C. Berkeley in 1967. The thesis is that languages develop their color words in a specific order regardless of language family or location. One can therefore understand the complexity and maturity of a language by how many color words they have.

Languages, the authors content, begin with black and white (or dark and light). The first color to be added is red. From there the next color is yellow. And then things get tricky. Languages evolve either with blue or green. Then the other one (either green or blue) before moving onto the remaining colors: orange, brown, pink, gray.

I was curious to read their study because I've read articles that describe how Homeric Greek and early English didn't use color language the way we do now. Before blue and green there were descriptive words like bilious, or for purple, livid.

In the time since I first read those articles (about a decade ago) and reading Basic Color Terms, I've begun working seriously as an artist, which means thinking about color in ways I haven't done in years. In reading this study as an artist I can see some of the biases that went into their work.

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.

Three stars

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