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- The Pirahã and their colour terms, The New Yorker, April 2007
- HP's Online Color Thesaurus
- Color-Name Dictionaries
(no subject)
Apr. 10th, 2009 07:41 pmVia ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
drhoz: the peacock spider.
The Munsell colour system makes me think of a map of the Planes from AD&D.
Incomplete and Complete Achromatopsia
HTML Color Names
Color Name & Hue is a colour identification tool for the colourblind.
Lesser Known Colour Vocabulary A-C, D-L, M-R, S-Z
drhoz: the peacock spider.The Munsell colour system makes me think of a map of the Planes from AD&D.
Incomplete and Complete Achromatopsia
HTML Color Names
Color Name & Hue is a colour identification tool for the colourblind.
Lesser Known Colour Vocabulary A-C, D-L, M-R, S-Z
(no subject)
Feb. 21st, 2009 08:55 pmJapanese colour terms (search for the word colour to find them)
Japanese traditional colour names
Japanese Color Guide
Hungarian has two words for red
Postage stamp colour names
sinople means both "red" and "green"
Australian Aboriginal artist Minnie Pwerle
Imaging of connectivity in the synaesthetic brain at the blog Neurophilosophy; more at the blog Madam Fathom.
'Can anyone hear that picture?', BBC News, 7 August 2008.
Japanese traditional colour names
Japanese Color Guide
Hungarian has two words for red
Postage stamp colour names
sinople means both "red" and "green"
Australian Aboriginal artist Minnie Pwerle
Imaging of connectivity in the synaesthetic brain at the blog Neurophilosophy; more at the blog Madam Fathom.
'Can anyone hear that picture?', BBC News, 7 August 2008.
(no subject)
Dec. 26th, 2007 06:40 pmThe 13 August 2005 issue of New Scientist reported that a remote Brazilian people, the Pirahã, have no words for colours - only for "light" and "dark". At first it was thought that they had a few colour words, such as "black", but these turned out to be descriptive phrases. A New Yorker article explains further:
"Everett also learned that the Pirahã have no fixed words for colors, and instead use descriptive phrases that change from one moment to the next. 'So if you show them a red cup, they're likely to say, "This looks like blood," ' Everett said. 'Or they could say, "This is like vrvcum" — a local berry that they use to extract a red dye.'"
"Everett also learned that the Pirahã have no fixed words for colors, and instead use descriptive phrases that change from one moment to the next. 'So if you show them a red cup, they're likely to say, "This looks like blood," ' Everett said. 'Or they could say, "This is like vrvcum" — a local berry that they use to extract a red dye.'"
Basic Colour Terms
Nov. 13th, 2006 03:58 amIn the late sixties, anthropologists at Berkeley quizzed native speakers of languages from around the world to determine those languages' basic colour terms. They found that there are eleven basic colour terms in human languages: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, orange, pink, grey.
Teh study used several criteria to define a "basic colour term". For example, basic term is not made up of other parts with their own meaning, such as "blue-green" or "like beeswax"; is not covered by another term, such as "crimson" and "scarlet" which are both synonymous with "red"; is not restricted to a small range of referents (eg "blond"); and is "psychologically salient for all informants" - for example "the color of the rust on my aunt's old Chevrolet" would not be obvious or widely or often used; and so on.
Not all languages have all eleven terms; at least one has only two. Languages consistently add new terms in a specific order, starting with black and white, next red, then green (or occasionally yellow), then yellow (or occasionally green), then blue, then brown, then the remaining colours.
At each stage, more colours are distinguished from each other. For instance, the Hanunóo word for "black" includes violet, indigo, blue, and dark green; the word for "red" covers orange and yellow. The anthropologists suggested that more colour terms are needed the more complicated and industrialised a culture becomes. (This made me think of "mauve", named when the dye was invented in 1856.)
Intriguingly, Hungarian has two basic terms for "red" and Russian has separate basic terms for "light blue" and "dark blue" - the anthropologists suggest this may mean there are even more stages in the evolution of colour terms in languages.
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This is my own summary of: Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. UCP, Berkeley, 1991 (reprint of original 1969 study, with bibliography of more recent studies).
Teh study used several criteria to define a "basic colour term". For example, basic term is not made up of other parts with their own meaning, such as "blue-green" or "like beeswax"; is not covered by another term, such as "crimson" and "scarlet" which are both synonymous with "red"; is not restricted to a small range of referents (eg "blond"); and is "psychologically salient for all informants" - for example "the color of the rust on my aunt's old Chevrolet" would not be obvious or widely or often used; and so on.
Not all languages have all eleven terms; at least one has only two. Languages consistently add new terms in a specific order, starting with black and white, next red, then green (or occasionally yellow), then yellow (or occasionally green), then blue, then brown, then the remaining colours.
At each stage, more colours are distinguished from each other. For instance, the Hanunóo word for "black" includes violet, indigo, blue, and dark green; the word for "red" covers orange and yellow. The anthropologists suggested that more colour terms are needed the more complicated and industrialised a culture becomes. (This made me think of "mauve", named when the dye was invented in 1856.)
Intriguingly, Hungarian has two basic terms for "red" and Russian has separate basic terms for "light blue" and "dark blue" - the anthropologists suggest this may mean there are even more stages in the evolution of colour terms in languages.
__
This is my own summary of: Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. UCP, Berkeley, 1991 (reprint of original 1969 study, with bibliography of more recent studies).
