The surprising pattern behind color names around the world
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Published 2017-05-16
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In 1969, two Berkeley researchers, Paul Kay and Brent Berlin, published a book on a pretty groundbreaking idea: that every culture in history, when they developed their languages, invented words for colors in the exact same order. They claimed to know this based off of a simple color identification test, where 20 respondents identified 330 colored chips by name. If a language had six words, they were always black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. If it had four terms, they were always black, white, red, and then either green or yellow. If it had only three, they were always black, white, and red , and so on. The theory was revolutionary — and it shaped our understanding of how color terminologies emerge.
Read more on the research mentioned in this video:
Cook, Kay, and Regier on the World Color Survey: goo.gl/MTUi9C
Stephen C. Levinson on Yele color terms: goo.gl/CYDfvw
John A. Lucy on Hanunó'o color terms: goo.gl/okcyC3
Loreto, Mukherjee, and Tria on color naming population simulations: goo.gl/rALO1S
To learn more about how your language's color words can affect the way you think, check out this video lecture: goo.gl/WxYi1q
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All Comments (21)
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Dividing colors between "light", "dark" and "red" seemed weird only until I realized that's exactly how I divide laundry.
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Imagine trying to translate this video into one of the languages with 3 colours
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In Kazakh "Green" and "Blue" used to have the same word "Kök". The word only meaning "Green", which is "Jasıl" became part of the language a lot later. This is why sometimes you see Juice boxes labelled as "Blue Apple", because some people are not used to the new word yet.
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In Vietnamese, there’s no word for green. There’s blue, and then there’s “leaf-blue” to describe green. So my Vietnamese parents sometimes have a hard time differentiating between objects that are green vs blue because they’re the same word. I thought it was weird until I realized it’d be like me differentiating between indigo and blue/purple, which is a color I didn’t grow up learning.
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Of course the most important colours to humans are night, day, and berry.
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ahh yes the three primary colors, light, dark, and red.
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Even in English, many color names, even some “basic” ones, got their names from things. The color orange is named after the fruit orange, or rather, the fruit of the orange tree (what it was originally called). Until the English found out about oranges, they referred to that color as “reddish yellow.” Purple comes from the purpura mussels whose shells are deep purple or navy blue, and were the source for dyes of that color range (a very expensive source of dye in ancient times, which is why it was a sign of royalty or great wealth to wear purple). Those dyes range in color from what we today would call “crimson” to what we today would call “navy blue,” and would include “violet.”
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Fun Fact, a lot of Japanese colors are metaphorical in nature. Such as brown being 茶色 literally "tea color" the same goes for yellow 黄色(amber color), gray 灰色 (ash color), and formerly blue which shared a word with green for a while. Orange and pink more recently were brought along with English.
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Hey, what colour is your hair? Kpe
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In my native language, Vietnamese, we consider blue and green to be shades of the same color. To distinguish between the two, you have to qualify it by saying "sea color" or "plant color". On a random note, we have two words with crabs. It's interesting to see where a language and people's priorities lie.
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In russian purple is not for "purpurnyy", it's for "fioletovyy"
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In Russian, "purpurnyy" can be a shade of red, purple and similar to magenta. I think the word "fioletovyy" is used more often, and it corresponds more to the shade in the video. The most accurate definitions are "sirenevyy" or "lilovyy" (lilac), which describe colors through the coloring of flowers.
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This was far more interesting than I thought it was going to be.
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5:23 "Blue, on the other hand, was fairly scarce." Water and Sky: Am i a joke to you?
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Also in Russian, the words "kofeynyy" (coffee), "kirpichnyy" (brick) can be used for shades of brown, for green shades -- salatovyy, travyanoy (herbal), izumrudnyy (emerald). Sometimes colors are associated with substances like honey, sand, milk.
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I have just realised that Russian and English speakers use different set of colours do describe the rainbow, though the total number of colours is still 7 for each: Russians use their unique "goluboy" (pigeon blue) color, but do not use the pink colour. Also as a Russian I never thought of pink as a separate colour, more like a lighter version of purple. It feels kinda odd because I cannot even pick the pink colour out of rainbow spectrum.
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Ah yes, I am watching a video about colors while being colorblind, definitily my smartest idea
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In Uzbek language, we don't actually have any words for "grey", "orange", and "brown". If one wants to describe an object of one of these colours in Uzbek they say "colour of ash", "colour of fire", and........ "colour of liver".
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I've just realized that russian "rozovyy" comes from "rose", so it's quite comparative. However, we don't use it as "the color of rose", it's just a fun-fact from etymology.
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