Color names
Behind the Name has a page of name themes that links to lists of names by themes of meaning.
Among the themes are lists of names meaning various colors. This obviously called for a comparison of the number of names listed by Behind the Name for each color with the order of colors in the Berlin-Kay analysis of the order in which colors enter languages.
Sedesdraconis did a similar thing a while back with the number of photos tagged with color terms on Flikr (here), which is no doubt what gave me the idea.
To summarize Berlin and Kay: Languages vary significantly in the number of color terms they have. But, if you know HOW MANY color terms a language has, you can pretty much guess what colors they are because there is a consistent order in which color terms come into languages. First come words for "light" and "dark". If a language goes beyond that, it adds "red". And so on, like this:
Dark-cool and light-warm (this covers a larger set of colors than English "black" and "white".)
Red
Either green or yellow
green and yellow
Blue
Brown
Purple, pink, orange, or grey
Counting the number of names listed by color terms I got:
Color Number of names
Light 233
Dark 42
Red 30
Green 21
Blue 14
Purple 12
Brown 9
Yellow 7
Grey 6
Orange 2
Which is pretty close to what you would predict, using the Berlin-Kay index. Except for a couple odd points.
First and least odd is the huge difference between the number for "light" and "dark". "Light" has vastly more names than anything else where as "dark", while the next highest, is in the same order of magnitude as "red". But this is not too surprising, given that "light" has a strong positive connotation in many cultures and "dark" tends to have negative connotations. Diurnal species that we are.
What IS surprising is the positions of "yellow" and "purple" respectively in the number of names.
Predicting based on the Berlin-Kay ordering, "yellow" should be between "green" and "blue". But it is nowhere close.
Also, "purple" should be down with "gray" and "orange". But It's not. It's almost as well represented as "blue"!
Sedesdraconis says that the low position of "yellow" seems especially odd to him because he would expect hair colors to be over represented in names. Which would mean that "yellow" would appear HIGHER than expected. But, in fact, the opposite is true. The theory that hair colors should be over represented would also predict that brown, black and orange should be higher than expected but they are all right where they should be, according to the Berlin-Kay color order.
I've got no theories, at the moment, about what's up with "yellow" and "purple" here.
Among the themes are lists of names meaning various colors. This obviously called for a comparison of the number of names listed by Behind the Name for each color with the order of colors in the Berlin-Kay analysis of the order in which colors enter languages.
Sedesdraconis did a similar thing a while back with the number of photos tagged with color terms on Flikr (here), which is no doubt what gave me the idea.
To summarize Berlin and Kay: Languages vary significantly in the number of color terms they have. But, if you know HOW MANY color terms a language has, you can pretty much guess what colors they are because there is a consistent order in which color terms come into languages. First come words for "light" and "dark". If a language goes beyond that, it adds "red". And so on, like this:
Dark-cool and light-warm (this covers a larger set of colors than English "black" and "white".)
Red
Either green or yellow
green and yellow
Blue
Brown
Purple, pink, orange, or grey
Counting the number of names listed by color terms I got:
Color Number of names
Light 233
Dark 42
Red 30
Green 21
Blue 14
Purple 12
Brown 9
Yellow 7
Grey 6
Orange 2
Which is pretty close to what you would predict, using the Berlin-Kay index. Except for a couple odd points.
First and least odd is the huge difference between the number for "light" and "dark". "Light" has vastly more names than anything else where as "dark", while the next highest, is in the same order of magnitude as "red". But this is not too surprising, given that "light" has a strong positive connotation in many cultures and "dark" tends to have negative connotations. Diurnal species that we are.
What IS surprising is the positions of "yellow" and "purple" respectively in the number of names.
Predicting based on the Berlin-Kay ordering, "yellow" should be between "green" and "blue". But it is nowhere close.
Also, "purple" should be down with "gray" and "orange". But It's not. It's almost as well represented as "blue"!
Sedesdraconis says that the low position of "yellow" seems especially odd to him because he would expect hair colors to be over represented in names. Which would mean that "yellow" would appear HIGHER than expected. But, in fact, the opposite is true. The theory that hair colors should be over represented would also predict that brown, black and orange should be higher than expected but they are all right where they should be, according to the Berlin-Kay color order.
I've got no theories, at the moment, about what's up with "yellow" and "purple" here.