I am reading Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution
Paul Kay and Brent Berlin (1969). Their observation is that when a language has a limited number of color words, which colors are given priority is a fairly universal order of operations beginning with black and white, moving on to red and spreading out from there.
They have samples of words from dozens of languages and still manage to be biased by their western colonizer heritage. In the introduction where they explain their method they first equate number of basic color words with how evolved a given culture's society is. They later make a similar statement but replace society with level of industrialization.
Further more they exclude "borrowed" words from languages if those languages happen to be ones spoken by a colonized person. There is no similar discussion of borrowed words showing up in a colonizer language (English or Spanish for example).
@bookstodon On page 35 in the discussion of "Stage VII" languages, the authors state that Catalan has no word for orange. Given that oranges come from that region of the world and keeping in mind that "orange" is a borrowed word from Spanish "naranja" I called bullshit. The word is "taronja."
And that brings me to second complaint of this study. The reporting language experts aren't native speakers. Nor are they artists. They are primarily anthropologists from colonizing nations.
@pussreboots@bookstodon
a metric fekkton of our words for different colours (Swedish) is basically loanwords. How does that work - and at what point do the authors assume a loanword is not a loanword?
@ohyran@bookstodon The metric seems to be: if European language and if short word, then basic color word. I will be posting more thoughts on this book as I read it. I ran out of characters in my first post. #color
Add comment