![]() ![]() Previous work (such as by anthropological linguists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay) has suggested that the order in which new color terms are added to a language is largely fixed. Contrary to previous assumptions, what we found suggests that color words aren’t unique in how they evolve in language. ![]() ![]() That is, do the words change independently, or does change in one word trigger a change in others? In our research, recently published in the journal PNAS, we used a computer modeling technique more common in biology than linguistics to investigate typical patterns and rates of color term change. My colleague Hannah Haynie and I were interested in how color terms might change over time, and in particular, in how color terms might change as a system. For example, for languages without a separate word for “orange,” hues that we’d call “orange” in English might be named by the same color that English speakers would call “red” or “yellow.” We can think of these terms as a system that together cover the visible spectrum, but where individual terms are centered on various parts of that spectrum. In languages with fewer terms than this – such as the Alaskan language Yup'ik with its five terms – the range of a word expands. In a 1999 survey by linguists Paul Kay and Luisa Maffi, languages were roughly equally distributed between the basic color categories that they tracked. English, for example, has the full set of 11 basic colors: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, pink, gray, brown, orange and purple. Most languages have between two and 11 basic color words. “Black” comes from a word meaning “burnt,” and “white” comes from a word meaning “shining.”Ĭolor words vary a lot across the world. But even our words “black” and “white” didn’t originate as color terms. Some of the more exotic ones, like “vermilion” and “chartreuse,” were borrowed from French, and are named after the color of a particular item (a type of mercury and a liquor, respectively). It is striking that English color words come from many sources. ![]()
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