Message-Id: <199707230052.UAA12365@brickbat8.mindspring.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 20:57:16 -0500
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
From: bbenzon@mindspring.com (Bill Benzon)
Subject: Color Terms
>
>>From what I've read, there is a remarkable similarity between color
>systems. In most languages, the end of 'red' and the start of 'orange'
>is in about the same place. The Hopi have an intermediate term between
>orange and red.
>
The basic work on color terms, done by Berlin and Kay, is summarized at the
following URL (from a dissertation on a computational approach to color
terms):
http://www.cs.buffalo.edu/pub/colornaming/diss/section2.7.2.html
Here's the guts of it (quoted from the above URL):
..... The distributional restrictions across languages can be summarized as a
sequence of ``evolutionary stages'':
1.All languages have terms for white, black (or more accurately, for
light-warm and dark-cool colors).
2.If a language encodes 3 categories, it contains a term for red, in
addition to the terms encoded in the first stage.
3.If a language encodes 4 categories, it contains a term for green or a
term for yellow, in addition to the terms encoded in the previous stage.
4.If a language encodes 5 categories, it contains terms for green and
yellow, in addition to the terms encoded in the previous stage.
5.If a language encodes 6 categories, it contains a term for blue, in
addition to the terms encoded in the previous stage.
6.If a language encodes 7 categories, it contains a term for brown, in
addition to the terms encoded in the previous stage.
7.If a language encodes 8 or more categories, it contains terms for purple,
pink, orange, grey, or some combination of these, in addition to the terms
encoded in the previous stage.
William L. Benzon 201.217.1010
708 Jersey Ave. Apt. 2A bbenzon@mindspring.com
Jersey City, NJ 07302 USA http://www.newsavanna.com/wlb/
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