Color Appearance and the Emergence and Evolution of Basic Color Lexicons

Various revisions of the Berlin and Kay (1969) model of the evolution of basic color term systems have been produced in the last thirty years, motivated by both empirical and theoretical considerations. On the empirical side, new facts about color naming systems have continually come to light, which...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American anthropologist 1999-12, Vol.101 (4), p.743-760
Main Authors: Kay, Paul, Maffi, Luisa
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anthropology
Cognitive problems, arts and sciences, folk traditions, folklore
Color
Color vision
Colors
Ethnography
Ethnology
Evolution
Idioms
Language
Linguistic anthropology
Linguistic studies. (onomastics, ethnonymy, anthroponymy, toponymy)
Main lines
Naming
Perception
Sapir, Edward
Semantics
Trajectories
Words
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Summary:Various revisions of the Berlin and Kay (1969) model of the evolution of basic color term systems have been produced in the last thirty years, motivated by both empirical and theoretical considerations. On the empirical side, new facts about color naming systems have continually come to light, which have demanded adjustments in the descriptive model. On the theoretical side, there has been a sustained effort to find motivation in the vision science literature regarding color appearance for the synchronic and diachronic constraints observed to govern color terminology systems. The present paper continues the pursuit of both of these goals. A new empirical question is addressed with data from the World Color Survey (WCS), and a revised model is proposed, which both responds to recently raised empirical questions and provides new motivation from the field of color vision for the observed constraints on color naming.
ISSN:0002-7294
1548-1433
DOI:10.1525/aa.1999.101.4.743