Interestingly, the ways that languages categorize color vary widely. Non-industrialized cultures typically have far fewer words for colors than industrialized cultures. So while English has 11 words that everyone knows, the Papua-New Guinean language Berinmo has only five, and the Bolivian Amazonian language Tsimané has only three words that everyone knows, corresponding to black, white, and red. [...]
The most widely accepted explanation for the differences goes back to two linguists, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. In their early work in the 1960s, they gathered color-naming data from 20 languages. They observed some commonalities among sets of color terms across languages: If a language had only two terms, they were always black and white; if there was a third, it was red; the fourth and fifth were always green and yellow (in either order); the sixth was blue; the seventh was brown; and so on. [...]
What’s more, this nativist theory doesn’t address why industrialization, which introduced reliable, stable, and standardized colors on a large scale, causes more color words to be introduced. The visual systems of people across cultures are the same: in this model, industrialization should make no difference on color categorization, which was clearly not the case. [...]
So contrary to the earlier nativist visual salience hypothesis, the communication hypothesis helped identify a true cross-linguistic universal—warm colors are easier to communicate than cool ones—and it easily explains the cross-cultural differences in color terms. It also explains why color words often come into a language not as color words but as object or substance labels. For instance, “orange” comes from the fruit; “red” comes from Sanskrit for blood. In short, we label things that we want to talk about.
No comments:
Post a Comment