Hunter-Gatherer Color Naming Provides New Insight into the Evolution of Color Terms

Abstract

SUMMARY Most people name the myriad colors in the environment using between two and about a dozen color terms [1], with great variation within and between languages [2]. Investigators generally agree that color lexicons evolve from fewer terms to more terms, as technology advances and color communication becomes increasingly important [3]. However, little is understood about the color naming systems at the least technologically-advanced end of the continuum. The Hadza people of Tanzania are nomadic hunter-gatherers who live a subsistence lifestyle that was common before the advent of agriculture (see SM-I, [4]), suggesting that the Hadzane language should be at an early stage of color lexicon evolution. When Hadza, Somali, and U.S. informants named 23 color samples, Hadza informants named only the black, white and red samples with perfect consensus. Otherwise, they used low-consensus terms, or responded “don’t know”. However, even low-consensus color terms grouped test colors into lexical categories that aligned with those found in other world languages [5]. Furthermore, information-theoretic analysis showed that color communication efficiency within the Hadza, Somali, and U.S. language communities falls on the same continuum as other world languages. Thus, the structure of color categories is in place in Hadzane, even though words for many of the categories are not in general use. These results suggest that even very simple color lexicons include precursors of many color categories, but that these categories are initially represented in a diverse and distributed fashion.

Color naming across languages reflects color use

“…To compare color communication efficiency across languages, we follow others (3,11) in estimating the overall informativeness of the color system of each language by averaging the average surprisal across the chips (Eq. 2; see SI Appendix, section 3 for a worked-out example): X c PðcÞSðcÞ.…”

“…Cross-cultural studies of color naming appear to indicate that color categories are universal (1)(2)(3). However, the variability in color category boundaries among languages (4), and the lack of consensus of the forces that drive purported universal color categories (5,6), promotes the idea that color categories are not universal, but shaped by culture (7).…”

“…We analyzed our data using information theory, building on work that suggests that color naming can be better understood by considering informativeness rather than opponent-process theory (3,11,15). This analysis can be understood in terms of a communication game (16)(17)(18).…”

Variations in normal color vision. VII. Relationships between color naming and hue scaling

“…These differences have emphasized the “cultural relativism” of color naming. This relativism could arise because verbal categories are presumably also shaped by interaction and communication among observers (Jameson & Komarova, 2009, Lindsey, Brown, Brainard & Apicella, 2015, Steels & Belpaeme, 2005), so that categories are influenced by both perception and language [e.g. (Cibelli, Xu, Austerweil, Griffiths & Regier, 2016)], as well as a variety of other factors or decision rules at the various levels of representing and categorizing color (Cropper, Kvansakul & Little, 2013, Parraga & Akbarinia, 2016).…”

Seeing Colors: Cultural and Environmental Influences on Episodic Memory

“…The Tsimanè live a pseudo hunter-gatherer lifestyle and have little contact with industrialized communities in Bolivia. There are well-known group differences in color naming and short-term memory across populations (Roberson et al., 2005), for example, there is evidence showing that hunter-gatherer-like communities, similar to the Tsimanè, have three to five lexical color categories (Lindsey, Brown, Brainard, & Apicella, 2015). In Tsimanè language, color words are highly variable and, as is the case in other languages, when there is not a label for the color, it is labeled with a description—for example, yellow might be called color-of-the-cuchicuciyeisi-tree (i.e., the cuchi [ Astronium urundeuva ] tree native to Bolivia).…”