Um...given that I teach about this at times, and would love to steal your notes for my class, I would love to discuss this. I would even be happy to play devil's advocate (patsy) and try to poke holes in your lecture.
Odd linguistics argument
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Piscivore
Smelling fishy
I want to hear it too.
I'd love to hear about it. I hope I can keep up, of course, but I'll absorb what I can.
All right. To some extent, I'm doing this from memory as my copy of the book is in my other office (or possibly in a box somewhere). But basically, what Berlin and Kay studied were the cross-linguistic properties of "basic color terms."
These are defined as single words that describe colors, with the following three properties.
1. the words are monomorphemic, meaning you can't break them apart into meaningful sub-units (which rules out words like "blueish-gray").
2. the words are not the names of any objects they purport to describe (which rules out "teal," "olive," and "cornflower").
3. the words are universally applicable across domains (which rules out words like "roan"," which can only be used to describe a horse).
In English, there are (IIRC) eleven such basic color terms:
black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, orange, pink, gray
However, this number is not "universal" -- many languages do not have words for all of these distinctions. What does seem to be universal is the hierarchical ordering of these words, which is to say, if a language has one of these terms, it will have all all of the terms to the left as well. No language, for example, has a word for blue, without having words for black, white, red, yellow, and green -- but a language might have words for green and yellow without having words for blue. (Japanese is such a language.)
So we've got clear evidence that color naming is, in fact, language-bound. However, Berlin and Kay did a number of other experiments, and found that there is no relationship between color naming and color perception. People had no problem distinguishing (or even describing) different "color," even when the same basic term was used in their language. The classic and off-cited example is from a language that had only three color terms -- black, white, and red -- but yellow things were distinguished from red things by being "red like banana." English-speakers do the same thing; we have "sky blue" and "navy blue" and "royal blue" and "midnight blue."
The ordering is not completely universal. For example, Finnish has had a word for grey for quite a long time (hundreds of years) but the word for pink is a very recent loan word: even I can remember time when we used 'light red' instead.
LordoftheLeftHand
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This reminds me of Orwell's writings where the Party was trying to destroy certain ideas (like thoughtcrime) by destroying words. The theory was that if you had no terms to express dissent; dissent would be impossible. While I don't really believe this, it sure is interesting.
LLH
LLH
ClusterBoy
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Fascinating. But is it true? I just asked the japanese native speaker in my office if that was true and she said no. Do you mean it is a recent import? Historically they didn't have one?
The word that the Japanese commonly use (today) for green is "midori," which literallly means "honeydew melon" -- and hence is not a "basic color term" as defined by Berlin and Kay. It's not "new" in the sense of being an imported loan word, but its use as a common descriptor instead of an unusual and somewhat metaphorical word is relatively new (past fifty years or so, I believe). The traditional Japanese word for "blue" (which I can't remember offhand) historically covers both blues and greens, and it is only within living memory that people have started not using it to refer to greens.
If you want an English analogy, think of "avocado," a word that really only became popular as a color descriptor in the 1960s and 1970s when it became the new hot designer shade for about fifteen minutes. The difference is that "avocado" didn't really have a new semantic space to move into, since "green" already existed in English, and it's very hard to displace existing basic color terms.
The actual ordering as found by Berlin and Kay is not entirely linear, but I lack the appropriate notation facilities to describe it accurately in this forum (and wanted to simplify to avoid making the post fifty meters long). A better description would be the following (top to bottom)
black
white
red
green | yellow
blue
brown
purple | orange | pink | grey
(assuming I remembered that right)
If a language has a word, then it has all the words above it, but not necessarily all the words on the same level. So a language may have a word for green or a word for yellow, but not necessarily both -- but if it has a word for blue, it will have separate words for green and for yellow.
Russian has no word for "privacy," but I have a clear memory of discussing with a friend of mine once how unhappy she was to be living in the same room as her mother. Since we couldn't call her uncomfortable feelings "lack of privacy," we instead talked about her mother being there all the time, etc., and understood perfectly what was so bad about that. So not having the word did not prevent either of us from experiencing and understanding lack of privacy, and later, when my family immigrated and I did acquire the word, I had no difficulty applying it to describe that situation.
Piscivore
Smelling fishy
How much of this is due to relatedness in the evolution of the languages, though? No language evolved in perfect isolation, right?
ETC: "languange"?
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Paul C. Anagnostopoulos
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Actually, it was an entire hour, namely one installment of Rowan and Martin's Laugh In.Drkitten said:
~~ Paul
aggle-rithm
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In Texas, we only have one word for snow: "Itllneverstick".
dogjones
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Pedantry
1. Does the fact that "orange" is included imply that the colour existed in English before the fruit?
2. Where does indigo fit in, assume same level as purple?
1. Does the fact that "orange" is included imply that the colour existed in English before the fruit?
2. Where does indigo fit in, assume same level as purple?
As little as possible. Standard practice in doing this kind of study is to select languages (and language groups) that are as areally and geographically separate as possible. So if I were to use English as a data point in this study, I wouldn't use German or Dutch as well -- and if I were to be really really careful, I wouldn't use any other Indo-European language at all, so no Russian, no Armenian, and no Greek, either. Similarly, I will only pick one language out of the dozens in use in China, and if possible I will pick a Chinese language used well away from the Korean border if I plan to use Korean as another language in my study.
Selecting samples for linguistic typology studies is something of an art form in and of itself -- but it's a well-known and well-understood art form. I don't remember the exact samples that Berlin and Kay used, but they have been held up as models to follow, so I assume that they did their work well.
Or that I misremembered "orange" as being treated a basic color word in English; if Berlin and Kay didn't treat it as "basic," then English has only ten basic terms, and other languages have a non-descriptive BCT term for that color that we don't have in English.
I'm not sure "indigo" is commonly enough understood to be used in this experiment. Part of the experiment involved asking people to point to an "X" paint chip. How many people would be able to identify or use "indigo"?
Of course, it's also the name of a plant as well (from which the color derives its name), so they may have excluded it on those grounds. I would need to check the journals for a question this specific.
pgwenthold
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Crows, otoh, can only count to about 3. They don't seem to be able to distinguish between 4 and 5.
ETA: I should add that they do this without any training, and can do it naturally.
Piscivore
Smelling fishy
Did they suggest a "why" those colours are named first?
Not really. There have been a few attempts to explain these results in terms of cognitive psychology since then, but none that I really find convincing or credible.
Piscivore
Smelling fishy
Here's a linguistics question then- how can we be certain, give our common genetic ancestry, that all existing languages did not have a common basis at some point?
We cannot. Nor can we be certain that faeries are not the true reason why bread rises.
On the other hand, we have extreme difficulty in reconstructing anything about language -- even the existence of it -- about 10,000 years ago. A few linguistics, most notably Ruhlen and Greenberg, have seriously proposed some reconstructions of a so-called proto-World language, but very few mainstream linguists take these reconstructions seriously, mostly due to a variety of methodological problems in their reconstruction.
So aside from the fact that the proto-World hypothesis is itself rather questionable, it then raises the issue of why there's no evident pattern in the distribution of color word schema. In particular, given the isolation of the various continents, we would expect to see characteristically "American" color word patterns, "Australian," and "Eurasian-African." We don't.
(As it happens, we also know that not all languages have a common genetic basis, because we've seen instances of language being created ex nihilo. NIcaraguan Sign Langauge is probably the best known and best documented. But these are isolated enough cases that the question as phrased is still meaningful.)