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The Language of Color
| Article
# : |
18054 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1990 |
2,776 Words |
| Author
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John Rossheim
John Rossheim is a linguist who has taught at Brown
University. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island. |
The human eye is remarkable in its ability to distinguish fine gradations in color. The visual system can discriminate among millions of hues found in nature and in the pigments created for everything from house paint to candle wax. But human languages, in giving labels to those colors, tend to keep things simple: Only a handful of names are commonly used, with each encompassing a range of hues. And the size of color vocabularies varies widely: Many languages have 11 basic color words; others have as few as 2.
The interplay between color perception and the language of color has raised a host of research questions. Linguists ask: Will the minimal, two-color lexicon of Jale, a New Guinean language, evolve along the same lines as French? Anthropologists wonder: if English has 11 basic color terms, how do the Kung Bushmen get along width just 5? Cognitive psychologists muse: how might human physiology influence the nature and progression of a language's partitioning of the color spectrum? The search for answers reveals that humankind's 3,000 languages have many colorful tales to tell.
The beginning of the story of color can be told in English. The color vocabulary of English shares certain features with the lexicons of all the world's languages. The broadest distinction within the English color lexicon between basic and nonbasic color terms, according to linguist Paul Kay and anthropologist Brent Berlin and Kay, the widely recognized pioneers of modern color-term theory, assert that the complete set of basic color terms in present-day English is: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray.
(Black, white,
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