Berlin and Kay
My present write-up was preceded by one explaining the basics of
Berlin and Kay's seminal study of
colour terms in language. As that noder has now removed that, I need to recap this thesis.
We tend to think of colours as intrinsic properties of things: they just are red, or yellow, or purple, and anyone with normal sight would agree. We also naturally think of words as transparent descriptions of reality. It takes some linguistic or psychological sophistication to realize that different languages chop the world up in different ways. What is the difference between a river, a stream, and a brook? Is a different language likely to describe the same watercourses by a matching three words of its own? In fact we shouldn't expect it to. Likewise, the range of colours is divided up differently in each language. What we think of as natural and even primary colours (such fundamental terms as red, blue, green, yellow) may be structured very differently for other people. But what Berlin and Kay proposed in their 1969 paper Basic Color Terms was that the way colour is divided up is not entirely arbitrary.
There are a couple of languages that have, remarkably, only two basic colour terms: an example is Bassa of Sierra Leone, and another is Dani of New Guinea. One word covers black and all warm/dark colours, the other white and cool/light colours. A couple more languages (such as Shona of Zimbabwe) have just three basic terms: red plus what's left from the above two. Numbers four and five are green and yellow, in either order. If a language has six colours, then the sixth one is something covering blue.1 If a language has more than six, the next ones it has are also ones we are familiar with in English, such as grey, purple. To sum up, there really are colour regions that are in some way more fundamental: so a language won't have names for three shades of blue but no distinction between red and yellow.
Two points need mentioning: these are basic colours (not mere shade terms like lavender or carmine), and not derivative from natural objects (like grass green or emerald green) or other names (blue-green, reddish). Even if a language has only a few basic terms, it can usually describe actual colours perfectly well by using compound terms.2
Now for my original write-up:
English colour terms
Colours are traditionally a source of confusion in language. After Berlin and Kay we know we shouldn't expect them to
translate neatly, but almost all
dictionaries and grammars were written before Berlin and Kay, or in ignorance of them. If you look up a (say) English-Bulgarian dictionary you'll find words for
pink, orange, purple because it's a
dictionary and there has to be something there, but that doesn't mean that Bulgarian has words for
pink,
orange, and
purple the way English has.
English is said to have eleven basic colour terms. Roget's Thesaurus lists all the colour terms they can think of under the eleven head-words yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, blue, green, brown, grey, black, white, and I think this is accurate for many (most?) native speakers, but I suspect there's a great deal more variation in practice. Some people would say violet instead of purple, saying that purple was a shade of violet, not vice versa. Some people wouldn't make this many distinctions in basic terms. Many's the time someone's said "the blue line", "the red car", or whatever, and I've stared at it and muttered silently, "it's not blue, it's purple".
The later basic terms of English, pink, orange, and purple, are spreading to other languages (pink often as the local word for rose), but the speakers even of closely related languages like Danish or Dutch might feel these are impositions: to them, they're no more basic than carmine or lavender, but their native system is now being reshaped by awareness of English.
Historically, Old English had an eight-colour system: red, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, grey, white. The others developed from particular coloured things: orange the fruit; pink the flower; and purple the dye from the murex. Looking into pre-history we can see that green is related to grass and grow, and less obviously yellow to gall and gold.
By the way, this nonsense that black and white "aren't colours" (meaning, if anything, aren't bright colours, or aren't colourful) has nothing to do with this language question. I know of no language that handles spectral and grey-scale colours differently.
Basic and focal
The distinction between basic terms and
shade terms is important. If something is
ultramarine, it's blue; if it's scarlet, it's also red. But a single shade can't be both red and purple, unless it's on the very border between them.
Berlin and Kay found that the focal regions of colours were much better defined than the boundaries. We think of canary yellow, fire engine red, sky blue, grass green. These same shades are usually focal across cultures: they reflect the peaks in sensitivity of our eyes. It's harder to assign border colours: a particular shade of aqua might be blue or green or both or neither or unclassifiable, depending on the speaker. It also seems easier to classify spectral colours, and harder to classify dingy or muted colours like ochre and beige.
Some of the canonical uses of a word may be well out on the periphery. Neither red hair nor red wine is anything like blood red, nor is white wine anything like snow white, and is not of course "white" at all, as the word is normally used. In other languages they might call it green wine or yellow wine. These are equally good, and equally conventional, since we only need to distinguish it from the kind we call red wine or black wine.
Ancient colour terms
There is a traditional puzzle about what colour words ancient cultures had (Greek, Roman, Irish). Many of their words seem to cover baffling arrays of different things, so that one term must be translated
blue, green, grey, yellow, white. Traditional solutions have included questioning whether they actually saw as we did; or saying that they didn't name colours by
hue but by some other factor such as warmth or intensity; or locating the focus of the colour at a surprising midpoint (e.g. Latin
caesius partly covering
blue and
grey gets glossed as 'bluish-grey'); or extracting a supposed common element and coming up with lots of words that mean
bright or
shining.
I would like to know what study has been done on these since Berlin and Kay, because a lot of the puzzles are probably explainable under one of the heads I've covered above. We have a few peculiar words for animal colours, like dun and roan and bay, but we could equally well say "red horse". It doesn't mean we think of them as fire engine red, or that we're twisting or extending red: we just need a conventional term to cover a non-focal shade.
One famous instance is Sappho's description, in To a Young Girl, of the lover trembling and about to faint as khlo:rotéra de poías 'greener than grass'. You can claim that khlo:ros means 'pale' or 'pale green' or poias means some plant other than the bright denizen of today's lawns, but I don't think an isolated example is important, and you can't wring from it a thesis that the Greeks either saw or named colours strangely. (Of course, 'as green as' is a simple metaphor - it's the 'greener(?) than' that's odd.)
Sappho, by the way, also illustrates another peril, of just not getting a reference: a famous phrase from Homer is 'rosy-fingered dawn', which is a pleasing and clear image. Sappho used the same word to refer to the moon. This is an odd image if you think of rhododaktylos (Sappho's brododaktylos) as 'rosy': the element rhodo- looks very like 'red'. But it's actually an unrelated word, rose the flower, and she meant white. She also calls parsley white: referring to its flowers.
Clearly glaûkos did cover the range of blue, green, and grey in Greek. But I don't know (and my references are useless at telling me, because of how old they are) whether this is truly a basic term in an ancient few-colour system, or whether one of these translations is of the "white wine" type. My dictionary tells me kyaneos is also blue, but doesn't let me judge the range of shades or whether it's basic.
I'm sure there are scholars who have now done this, and much better answers are out there, but I am raising the point as an illustration of how particularly inadequate a simple dictionary listing is at conveying the nuances of colour terms.
Beyond the eleven
If we accept the standard eleven as true of English - for some English-speakers anyway, then we have a lot. Only a few languages make distinctions that we don't:
Russian has different words for
dark blue and
light blue, and
Hungarian has a separate word for
dark red... as have I myself.
To end with personal observations, I have a twelfth basic colour, crimson. My family are artistic, though I seem to lack the gene for telling which end of the brush to point; so I did some tests on them and found they all had extra basic colours. They all have aqua, and one or two extra colours in the area of beige, ochre, or tan. My father, surprisingly, has scarlet between red and orange. I made sure to confirm this because it seemed much less natural to me than the others. (Well, I suppose I really tested their groupings, not their colour names as such. I would have to have done forced-choice experiments to ensure that their naming matches their grouping.)
The fact that I use the same word blue for a large range doesn't mean that I see them all the same, in any sense. I'd be very happy if my language had two different terms for dark blue and light blue, with their own foci. To a lesser extent I feel the same about brown and green. Yet I am stuck with the basic terms I have: I can't force myself to elevate, say, indigo and azure to basic status; nor conversely can I ever think of crimson as a shade of red.
I knew someone whose visual spectrum was shifted a little into the infra-red. I would love to have tested her, though she didn't want to be turned into a psychological experiment. I wonder what basic terms colour-blind people have.
Remember, colour naming is not about the ability to discriminate. As far as I know, with obvious exceptions that are clearly genetically aberrant, all people in the world are equally good at discriminating. It is the naming that varies so much.
1. The North American language Cree has a separate blue but combined green-yellow, in contradiction of this generalization Berlin and Kay made.
2. The New Guinean language Yélîdnye is reported as, extraordinarily, not naming all colours. It has words for only black, white, and red, and descriptions for blue, green, and yellow, but these don't cover the rest.