It has been proposed that semantic systems evolve under pressure for efficiency. This hypothesis has so far been supported largely indirectly, by synchronic cross-language comparison, rather than directly by diachronic data. Here, we directly test this hypothesis in the domain of color naming, by analyzing recent diachronic data from Nafaanra, a language of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and comparing it with quantitative predictions derived from the mathematical theory of efficient data compression. We show that color naming in Nafaanra has changed over the past four decades while remaining near-optimally efficient, and that this outcome would be unlikely under a random drift process that maintains structured color categories without pressure for efficiency. To our knowledge, this finding provides the first direct evidence that color naming evolves under pressure for efficiency, supporting the hypothesis that efficiency shapes the evolution of the lexicon.

Abstract. This paper presents two case studies of segment-internal timing distinctions which motivate Q Theory, in which each segment (Q) is represented as a string of featurally uniform subsegments (q), e.g. (q1 q2 q3), corresponding to the informal concepts of onset, target, and offset (Inkelas & Shih 2013, 2016, 2017, Shih & Inkelas 2014. We argue, based on Panará and Hungarian, that this representational richness is motivated by the need to represent phonologically tripartite segments, as well as segment-internal timing distinctions that are phonologically contrastive. In addition to supporting existing Q theory architecture, we also argue for expanding the repertoire of Q Theory further to include phonologically long segments, such as geminates.

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It has been proposed that semantic systems evolve under pressure for efficiency. This hypothesis has so far been supported largely indirectly, by synchronic cross-language comparison, rather than directly by diachronic data. Here, we directly test this hypothesis in the domain of color naming, by analyzing recent diachronic data from Nafaanra, a language of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and comparing it with quantitative predictions derived from the mathematical theory of efficient data compression. We show that color naming in Nafaanra has changed over the past four decades while remaining near-optimally efficient, and that this outcome would be unlikely under a random drift process that maintains structured color categories without pressure for efficiency. To our knowledge, this finding provides the first direct evidence that color naming evolves under pressure for efficiency, supporting the hypothesis that efficiency shapes the evolution of the lexicon.