Nominator's statement

The book made two main points. (1) Although different languages have different numbers of basic color terms, the color terms of all languages tend strongly to be based on a small number of fundamental color perceptions, specifically black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and gray.(2) Languages tend to add terms in a partially fixed order. For example, a language with only two terms will have one that covers white, red, yellow and other 'warm' colors and another that includes black, green, blue and other 'cool' colors. When such a language adds a term, The white-yellow-red term will break up into a white term and a yellow-red term. Much empirical research has developed the theory of semantic universals and evolutionary development in basic color vocabularies since the original 1969 study of Berlin and Kay, and such researc is being carried on actively today (2000).

comments

• This book represents the first systematic study of the relationship between language structure and perception. The authors compared a variety of languages that differed in the number (and information encoded by) color word terms. The authors saught to investigate whether these differences (ie., no word for blue in a Native American language) affected speakers' abilities to identify colors in non-linguistic tasks. The study has since been problematicized, but truly stands as a landmark.