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Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969) (ISBN 1-57586-162-3) is a book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. Berlin and Kay's work helped provide evidence that the kinds of color terms a culture has (e.g., black, brown, red) are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has.
There are seven levels in which cultures fall, with Stage I languages having only the colors black and white (or light and dark) and Stage VII having more than six basic color terms. The English language falls into Stage VII with eleven basic color terms.
Since there seems to be a strong positive correlation between number of basic color terms and complexity of environment, it would seem to suggest that this is evidence of the evolution of language (which until recently has been ignored or dismissed by traditional Structural linguists).
