So black and white are the most salient, then red, and so on. They suggested that cultures start by naming the most salient colors, bringing in new terms one at a time, in order. They observed some commonalities among sets of color terms across languages: If a language had only two terms, they were always black and white if there was a third, it was red the fourth and fifth were always green and yellow (in either order) the sixth was blue the seventh was brown and so on.īased on this order, Berlin and Kay argued that certain colors were more salient. In their early work in the 1960s, they gathered color-naming data from 20 languages. The most widely accepted explanation for the differences goes back to two linguists, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. Is it about which colors stand out the most? The goal of our project was to understand why cultures vary so much in their color word usage. So while English has 11 words that everyone knows, the Papua-New Guinean language Berinmo has only five, and the Bolivian Amazonian language Tsimane’ has only three words that everyone knows, corresponding to black, white and red. Nonindustrialized cultures typically have far fewer words for colors than industrialized cultures. Interestingly, the ways that languages categorize color vary widely. But this is still a tiny fraction of the colors that we can distinguish. Maybe if you’re an artist or an interior designer, you know specific meanings for as many as 50 or 100 different words for colors – like turquoise, amber, indigo or taupe. In an industrialized culture, most people get by with 11 color words: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple and gray. But human language categorizes these into a small set of words. People with standard vision can see millions of distinct colors.
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