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).
