Biocultural Implications of Systems of Color Naming

Abstract

Preliminary analysis of color naming data from 111 languages in the World Color Survey confirms the main lines of the original Berlin and Kay hypothesis regarding the existence of semantic universals in basic color lexicons. The analysis further shows that visual physiology plays a role in the evolutionary development of basic color vocabularies, constraining the possible composite categories to a small number of those theoretically possible. One composite category, yellow/green, is clearly attested in the data, but the sequence leading to its emergence remains unknown.

Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

“…Himba basic color terms have not been previously established by other researchers (for example, in the World Color Survey of Kay et al, 1991) and so we used the same method of elicitation as and Heider and Olivier (1972).…”

“…Once one considers secondary terms there is far greater diversity. However, within these diverse naming systems there are noticeable generalities (Kay, Berlin & Merrifield, 1991;MacLaury, 1987) It is the finding of such generalities that led to the proposal of panhuman universals in cognitive color categorization that transcend terminological differences (e.g., Heider & Olivier, 1972). Roberson, Davies & Davidoff (2000) reported a series of experiments that set out to replicate and extend the work of Rosch Heider in the early 1970s (Rosch Heider, 1972, Heider & Olivier, 1972.…”

“…If there is a regular pattern of 'evolution' in color terminologies, as suggested by Kay, Berlin and Merrifield (1991), then two languages at the same evolutionary 'stage' (having five color terms) might be expected to have similar cognitive representations of color despite having very different environments. However, unlike the population tested by this investigation reports findings from Himba participants from twelve villages within a much larger population (estimated between 20,000 -50,000, Namibian Govt.…”

“…Himba has five basic terms according to the criteria of Kay et al (1991), a similar number to the Berinmo language studied by .…”

Universality of color categorization

“…He reports that his "results largely confirm the generalizations that [Kay & Maffi (1999) and Kay et al (1991)] achieved with non-statistical techniques, even though not all the proposed universals could be confirmed" (p. 525). The biggest difference Jäger found between his PCA analysis and the non-statistical analysis of Kay & Maffi (1999) was that he found yellow more frequently associated with white than they did (p. 533).…”