Augmenting a colour lexicon

Abstract

Languages differ markedly in the number of colour terms in their lexicons. The Himba, for example, a remote culture in Namibia, were reported in 2005 to have only a 5-colour term language. We re-examined their colour naming using a novel computer-based method drawing colours from across the gamut rather than only from the saturated shell of colour space that is the norm in cross-cultural colour research. Measuring confidence in communication, the Himba now have seven terms, or more properly categories, that are independent of other colour terms. Thus, we report the first augmentation of major terms, namely green and brown, to a colour lexicon in any language. A critical examination of supervised and unsupervised machine-learning approaches across the two datasets collected at different periods shows that perceptual mechanisms can, at most, only to some extent explain colour category formation and that cultural factors, such as linguistic similarity are the critical driving force for augmenting colour terms and effective colour communication.

ABANICCO: A New Color Space for Multi-Label Pixel Classification and Color Segmentation

“…Further research has proven that most people would use "simple" color terms instead, and only a small portion would use non-basic terms [19]. These limitations are maintained throughout different cultures and languages [12,20,21,22,23,24].…”

“…Much research has been devoted to color verbalization and understanding. These studies aim to find a suitable mapping between the digital representation of colors and the language employed by humans when referring to color in an attempt to close the semantic gap successfully [23,24,38]. This task is arduous because the human understanding of color is entirely subjective.…”

“…Because of this, several research works have applied fuzzy logic to successfully obtain a correspondence between the computational representation of colors and human perception. Within this approach, two subgroups of methods stand out: 1) those that rely on geometrically regular membership functions obtained from observer experiments; [2,23,45,46], 2) those going beyond and formalize fuzzy color spaces from human-obtained prototypes [24,30,47,48,49]. Methods in the first subgroup are problematic because they rely on color spaces that have arbitrary distances between color categories (HSV, HSL, RGB triplets) and require many observers.…”

Invariant categorical color regions across illuminant change coincide with focal colors

“…The terms gold or silver are used only for a glossy surface that exhibits specular reflection ( Okazawa, Koida, & Komatsu, 2011 ) or the term brown is used only to describe the color of a surface, not the color of a light ( Buck et al, 2016 ; Uchikawa, Uchikawa, & Boynton, 1989 ). In addition to these studies on the perceptual basis of categorical color perception, the demand of communication has been suggested to affect the geometry of color categories, showing the cultural influences on the formation of color categories ( Davidoff, 2001 ; Gibson et al, 2017 ; Mylonas et al, 2022 ; Steels & Belpaeme, 2005 ). In addition, color classification and categorization tasks are major interests in computer vision ( Parraga & Akbarini, 2020 ).…”

Words Gold – Golden (золотой – Златой – Золотистый) in Russian Poetical Colour and Metaphoric Palette

“…Color words have long attracted research interest of Psychology (Berlin & Kay, 1969;LIN Ling-Yu et al2022), Semiotics (CHEN Hui, 2004), Philosophy (KUI Yi-min, 2020), Culturology (Wierzbicka A.1990;Griber Y., 2018), cognitive Science (Lakoff, 1999;Dowman M., 2007) and education (Jin HongMei 2022) . In linguistics, existing research mainly focuses on the basic color words in different languages (Mylonas, D. et al, 2022), the associative meaning of color words (Root, N. et al, 2022), and the rhetorical function of color words (XIE Shi-xuan; TANG Xiao-ning 2015) and other. However, Most previous studies of the similar adjectives have not been connected with comparative analysis of adjectives gold -golden.…”