|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Language of Color
| Article
# : |
18054 |
|
|
Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
|
| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1990 |
2,776 Words |
| Author
: |
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, and gray are generally included in research on color terms. Although these "colors" are achromatic, or lacking in hue, they do have brightness values and thus occupy positions in color space, whose dimensions are hue, brightness, and saturation. Saturation is generally held constant in these studies.)
Beyond these basic words for color there is, of course, a much larger, open-ended inventory of nonbasic terms. These include chartreuse, blue-green, brunette, and so on. Berlin and Kay use any of several factors to disqualify color words from the set of basic terms. Chartreuse is classified as nonbasic because it is a relatively recent borrowing from French; blue-green is out because it is a compound of basic colors; brunette is excluded because it is generally only used to describe hair or complexion. All languages have nonbasic color words, and these play an important role in communication
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
