The basic colour terms of Ndebele∗

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

The article is written in the tradition of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay’s theory of basic color terms. According to this theory there is a universal inventory of eleven basic color categories from which the basic color terms of any given language are always drawn. The number of basic color terms varies from 2 to 11 and in a language having a fully developed color system there are eleven basic color terms: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and gray . The studies about basic color terms in sign languages show that lexicalization of basic color terms in sign languages follows the same pattern found in spoken languages. The current study is the first close study on the color terminology in Estonian Sign Language. The survey was carried out in summer 2005 and consisted of three tasks, following Davies and Corbett’s field method: the list task, the City University color vision test and the color-naming task. Fifty ESL users from different parts of Estonia were interviewed for the study. The collected data shows that the BCT hierarchy is clearly displayed in Estonian Sign Language and it may be concluded that Estonian Sign Language is a Stage VII language and has nine basic color terms: black , white , red , yellow , green , blue , gray , brown and pink / purple .

In this chapter, I determine Iron Ossetic1's basic color terms and the place of the Iron Ossetic2 system in the evolutionary sequence of the development of basic color terms. I examine the semantics and use of basic and non-basic color terms, morphological and lexical color modifiers, the main patterns used to describe color in modern Ossetic as well as connotations of color terms. I conclude by comparing the peculiarities of the Ossetic color system with the systems of some other Iranian languages. This study is based on the methodology proposed by A. Majid, F. Jordan, and M. Dunn (2011). The Ossetic material is taken from the field data collected in North Ossetia, Russia, and data from the Ossetic corpora3.

The goal of the paper is to analyze Yakut color terms from an etymological perspective. In all, fifty-one color terms have been collected from different Yakut dictionaries and electronic sources. The terms show a heterogeneous picture: the basic color terms are of Common Turkic origin (e.g. küöx ‘blue’, qara ‘black’, kïhïl ‘red’) representing the archaic features, some basic color terms are absent in other Modern Turkic languages due to internal developments involving special Turkic or specifically Yakut suffixes (e.g. saharxay ‘yellow’, kïtarxay ‘red’). The largest group of Yakut color terms includes Mongolic loanwords, most of which are connected to the colors of animals (especially horses), which prove the Mongolic influence on the Yakut lifestyle. Another part of the paper considers the special suffixes in Yakut forming adjectives designating shades of colors, which have a mixed, i.e. Turkic and Mongolic origin. The paper tries to shed light on the way color terms may play in determining the place of the Yakut language among the Turkic languages.

Russian reduplicated constructions with colour terms have never previously been an object of a comprehensive corpus study. Nevertheless, they present considerable interest for a researcher because comparative ability of colour terms to be reduplicated reflects their semantic and pragmatic differences, whereas semantics and pragmatics of reduplication construction are revealed in the properties of colour terms that can fill its slots. Thus, the goal of the paper is to study semantic and pragmatic properties of Russian colour terms and Russian syntactic reduplication construction by analyzing their co-occurrence. We apply corpus methods to the data from the Russian National Corpus, RuTenTen Corpus on Sketch Engine and RuSkell corpus. We analyze absolute corpus frequencies and collocation patterns of Russian non-reduplicated colour terms, as well as their relative frequencies and collocation patterns in the construction of syntactic reduplication with a hyphen ( belyj-belyj ‘white-white, very white, spotlessly white’). Drawing on this data, we establish that absolute frequencies of non-reduplicated colour terms in Russian reflect both Anna Wierzbicka’s “universals of visual semantics”, as well as certain language and culture-specific tendencies, as evidenced by the prominence of goluboj ‘light blue’ and ryzhij ‘carroty-red’ in Russian. We also argue that the Russian reduplication construction with a hyphen ( belyj-belyj ‘white-white) is semantically and prosodically different from the construction of repetition with a comma ( belyj , belyj ‘white, white’). The former has the meaning of high degree, and thus attracts only gradable colour terms, such as belyj ‘white’, chernyj ‘black’, sinij ‘medium to dark blue’, and other basic colour terms. There are additional factors that influence colour term reduplication. Collocation patterns suggest that colour terms that co-occur with the names of culturally and cognitively salient objects, such as denotations of human appearance (face, hands, skin, eyes, hair) or landscape features (sea, sky, fire, grass) are more likely to be reduplicated. Moreover, aesthetic or emotional evaluation of such objects (‘blue-blue eyes’, ‘green-green grass’) is also a factor that is conducive to their occurrence in the construction of reduplication. Our findings establish the importance of corpus methods in the study of colour terms and reduplication, demonstrate that the use and interpretation of lexical and syntactic items hinges both on semantic and pragmatic factors, and add to the understanding of semantics and pragmatics of Russian colour terms and reduplication construction.

The role of perception, language, and preference in the developmental acquisition of basic color terms

Previous research into metaphors containing colour terms has focused on the primary basic colour terms, yet examples can also be found with the secondary basic and non-basic colour terms. A case study of the colour terms purple and lavender is presented here. Situated within the Mapping Metaphor project, this analysis utilizes the unique data source, the Historical Thesaurus. In addition to thesaurus data, dictionaries were consulted to establish the etymologies of metaphorical phrases. Finally, corpus evidence was used to establish current usage of such phrases.

The object of this study is an analysis of the lexical means employed in the naming of colors, focusing especially on the form, function, and meaning of these color terms in the German language. Fashion magazines were used as source material for the research. The choice of magazines was determined by the high frequency of color terms. The basic color terms proved to be the most frequently exploited lexical means to describe one color, although it had been hypothetically assumed that there would be a quantitative preponderance of word formation structures, syntactic groups, and transferred designations. The decisive factor in the high frequency of basic color terms is their ability to function in a variety of ways. Not only as they describe a particular color of a garment, they are also increasingly used to express prediction and color trends, which is achieved by nominalization. But the goal has not always been a denotative correctness – rather the conveying of positive connotation.

The Berlin-Kay1 theory of color lexicon evolution rests on a definition of basic color terms that incorporates the criterion of psychological salience. Eleven color categories designated as “basic” are assumed to be more salient than all other color categories. Further, it has been argued2 that the relative salience of basic colors should correspond to the Berlin-Kay evolutionary order: i.e., black-white, red, green-yellow, blue, brown, purplepink-orange-gray. These assumptions have not been tested adequately; studies dealing with color term salience have been inconclusive. Rosch3 demonstrated that focal colors are perceptually more salient than nonfocals, and primary colors are more salient than nonprimaries. Her results, however, did not confirm the prediction that the relative salience of basic colors would match the evolutionary sequence. Pollnac (from Baganda informants) and Bolton (from Peruvians) examined the relative salience of color terms in listing task data.4 In both studies basic color categories were more salient than nonbasic color categories, and significant correlations emerged between the relative salience of basic color terms and the evolutionary sequence. Finally, both Harkness and Johnson found that the order of acquisition of color names by children parallels the evolutionary sequence.5

Color terms are important symbols in language that record human perception of the world, carrying both objective descriptive functions and rich cultural meta-phorical meanings. English and Chinese exhibit significant differences in the usage of color terms, especially concerning grammatical transcategorization (shifting from nouns or adjectives to verbs). Based on the statistical findings of Liao Zhenggang (2011) from large corpora (COCA, CCL), and combined with cognitive linguistic theories, this paper explores the cognitive motivations be-hind the frequency differences in the grammatical transcategorization of basic color terms between English and Chinese. The study finds that the verbalization frequency of Chinese color terms is approximately ten times that of English; “红” (red) is the most frequently verbalized in Chinese, while “brown” ranks highest in English. This discrepancy stems from the interaction of three aspects: firstly, the isolating characteristic of Chinese leads to fuzzy boundaries between word classes; secondly, the degrees of conventionalization of concep-tual metonymies involved in the verbalization of color terms, such as “Property for Change” and “Effect for Action”, differ between the two languages; thirdly, cultural models and experiential differences profoundly influence the semantic flexibility of color terms. This paper provides a systematic explanation for the phenomenon of grammatical transcategorization of color terms from a cognitive perspective and offers new insights for cross-linguistic comparative studies.

An exploration of colour terms in English-lexifier Atlantic creoles

In Basic color terms, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay propose that ‘there exist universally for humans eleven basic perceptual color categories, which serve as the psychophysical referents of the eleven or fewer basic color terms in any language’ (1991[1969]: 104). Later research has not invalidated this claim, although their evolutionary ‘encoding sequence’ has subsequently been modified (Fig. 25). The ‘perceptual’ and ‘psychophysical’ component of their theory has been investigated in relation to ethnographic and other materials, and synthesized by Kay and Chad McDaniel (1978: esp. 617 n. 4, 620 n. 5; see further Cole and Scribner 1974: 43–50; Tornay 1978; von Wattenwyl 1979).

The main purpose of this paper is to relate recent findings regarding the evolution of basic color term systems to current research in linguistic variation and language change. More specifically it is to provide in the area of lexical semantics a demonstration of the hypothesis that all linguistic change has its roots in synchronic heterogeneity of the speech community (cf. Weinreich, Labov & Herzog (1968: 188) for a general statement of this position, also many empirical demonstrations already reported, such as those by Labov (1972) and Wang (1969) in phonology and by Bickerton (1973) in syntax). Before taking up this topic, I summarize some recent revisions in the basic color term theory itself. (Ethnographic semantics, color terms, language variation, evolutionary universals in linguistic change.)

The ancient Egyptian language possesses 4 basic color terms; painting uses 7 and later 9 polychrome colors. These sets correspond to Stages Ilia, V, and VII (incomplete) of the Berlin and Kay encoding sequence for language, and support the theory of 11 “basic perceptual color categories.” The categories are probably available only through progressive differentiation. The use of color in pictorial representation fits an “active” rather than a “response” model for this expansion. The separation of color use and color terminology has significant cognitive implications.

The aim of this paper is to present colour terms used by scientists in the field of astrophysics. We take into consideration both basic and non-basic colour terms – as understood by Berlin and Kay (1969). The research material, compiled in a corpus with AntConc, consists of abstracts published in selected astrophysical journals. The corpus size is 2,319,787 words. The most frequent basic colour term found in the abstracts is black (612 occurrences), followed by white (167), red (160), blue (111) and green (98). It appears that the frequent word combinations in which these and other colour words are used happen to be specialized terms whose formation involved metaphorical or metonymic processes, e.g. red giant, white dwarf, red planet, red noise and blue straggler.