Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Brent Berlin , Paul Kay

Colourful Whorfian Ideas: Linguistic and Cultural Influences on the Perception and Cognition of Colour, and on the Investigation of Them

“…Despite the apparent strength of the Berlin and Kay position, their conclusions have from the first been subject to a variety of criticisms (Hickerson, 1971;Conklin, 1973). Because there now exists a large literature on this topic which is both increasingly technical (e.g.…”

Resolving the question of color naming universals

“…Thus, even if the results had rested on an objective test, it is unclear how well they would generalize to other sorts of languages. The results leave open the possibility that color naming is similar primarily across those languages that are linked to each other through the global process of industrialization (6,11,12). There are also further reasons to question the representativeness of the original data of BK (1): no more than a single speaker was tested for most languages, the data were gathered in the San Francisco Bay area rather than in the native locale of the language, and all of the speakers tested also spoke English (6,7,(11)(12)(13).…”

“…In one view, meaning is constrained by universally shared aspects of perception, cognition, or the environment; in the other, it is determined principally by the arbitrary linguistic conventions of a particular language. For this reason, the question of color naming universality has attracted considerable attention (1)(2)(3)(4)(5) and generated considerable controversy (6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13). Curiously, however, the core empirical question of whether there are genuine universal tendencies in color naming has never been put to objective test, and it remains contested (6-10).…”

On Color Categorization: Why Do We Name Seven Colors in the Rainbow?

“…The claim according to which there exists a universal set of basic color terms, which refer in the same way, and which emerge in the language following a partially constrained order, is contingent upon several questionable assumptions. First, this universalistic claim presupposes the notion of “basic color term,” the definition of which is problematic (see, for example, Hickerson; Lucy and Schweder; Crawford; Lyons; Saunders and Van Brakel). Second, it was recently argued that the best examples, or focal colors, which are said to be very similar across languages and structure categories, do not always yield similar space partitionings (Regier and Kay; Regier et al).…”