Color naming for the Persian language

Abstract

According to Berlin and Kay, there is a set of 11 universal basic color terms: White, Black, Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, Brown, Purple, Pink, Orange, and Gray. To approve this, a world survey (WCS) was begun to gather data on color categorization through the world, although, despite many languages, Persian language has not been studied so far. We report a study of color naming in Iran. A study was carried out in six major cities including: Tehran, Isfahan, Mashhad, Yazd, Rasht, and Shiraz to investigate the color naming for Persian language and also the effect of local culture. The main purpose of this study was to describe the basic color terms of Persian language and to verify Berlin and Kay's theory. In total, 200 subjects were studied from all the six cities. Our results showed that there were the same basic color terms (as Berlin and Kay's theory) in Persian language overall including:“ (White) ”,“ (Black) ”, “ (Red) ”, “ (Green) ”, “ (Yellow) ”, “ (Blue) ”, “ (Brown) ”, “ (Purple) ”, “ (Pink) ”, “ (Orange), ” and “ (Gray) ”. However, this was not valid for all the cities when they were investigated individually. There were 10 basic terms in Mashhad and Shiraz while the other cities had 11 basic terms. Also, the set of the used terms would differ by the city. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 40, 352–360, 2015

An attempt to reconstruct the meaning of al‐Tusi's color words

“…This was done by extending a recent study that one of us (SG) did on current color naming for the Persian language. 5 As shown also in other recent reconstructions of colors in historical texts, 6,7 such identifications may provide important insights in the historical development of color theory. By using results from an experiment with modern observers, we assume that color coordinates identified by modern observers from Iran correspond to the colors al-Tusi was refering to 750 years ago.…”

“…For example, we will show below that in a recent study on modern Persian color terms one of the present authors included twelve terms that also appear in al-Tusi's list. 5 Therefore, we expect many of al-Tusi's color terms to be well understood by the subjects in the main experiment.…”

“…Below we will show that the results from the present study agree well with those obtained in a previous study, in which a light cabinet was used in combination with a strongly limited set of Munsell color chips. 5 The description of the color terms was deliberately restricted to mentioning the term itself, since it was the purpose of the experiment to determine the nature of these terms as memory colors. The total observation time for each subject was <45 min, which is sufficiently short to avoid observer fatigue.…”

“…The experiment closely paralleled a recent study on modern color terms for the Persian language that one of the authors (SG) executed. 5 In the current experiment, 30 subjects were included, all based in Tehran. The subjects' age varied from 18 to 27 years old, apart from four older observers aged 35, 36, 52, and 53.…”

An exploration of malayalam basic and nonbasic color terms during a color naming task and in naturalistic narratives

“…When used in spontaneous speech, colors are not limited to their standard forms but instead tend to take varying labeling expressions. Future investigations can seek to understand the effects of culture on color terms (i.e., color naming behavior between native and non‐native Malayali speakers) because different ethnic backgrounds and climates are noted to influence color categorization . It is apparent, therefore, that color naming is an ever‐evolving field and a growing domain that cannot be analyzed in a limited color space.…”