Acquisition of Color Vocabulary

[lpetrich]

In 1969, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay published  Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, where they described research into different languages' color terms, and their conclusion that we acquire color vocabulary in a very definite sequence. They confined themselves to generic terms for colors. This work has been expanded on and revised:

• Universality of Color Categorization by Paul Kay
• The Typology of Color Terms
• Blutner: Color Words and Color Categorization
• WALS Online - Chapter Number of Basic Colour Categories
• The surprising pattern behind color names around the world - YouTube -- a nice video

To find generic color terms, one must avoid many color terms:

• Compounds: lemon-colored, blue-green
• Colors contained in other color definitions: crimson and scarlet as kinds of red
• Narrowly-applied colors: blond
• Those that are not psychologically salient: crimson, scarlet, bluish, ...

English thus has white, gray, black, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown. Russian has another one: light blue, much like pink (light red) (Colors in Russian - Picture Dictionary).

Here are the results. I will abbreviate the color names W: white, R: red, Y: yellow, G: green, Bu: blue, Bk: black.

1. (light, warm) W-R-Y . (dark, cool) G-Bu-Bk
2. W . R-Y . G-Bu-Bk
3. W . R . Y . G-Bu-Bk ___ W . R-Y . G-Bu . Bk ___ W . R . Y-G-Bu . Bk
4. W . R . Y . G . Bu-Bk ___ W . R . Y . G-Bu . Bk ___ W . R . Y-G . Bu . Bk
5. W . R . Y . G . Bu . Bk

Berlin and Kay originally proposed that step 3 would have the first two and step 4 the middle one. That is, either order of Y splitting off of R and G-Bu splitting off of Bk. They also proposed that brown is next after these colors, followed by pink, orange, brown, and gray. However, brown and/or gray sometimes get distinguished relatively early in the sequence. So it's only W, R, Y, G, Bu, and Bk that are fundamental.

The researchers' informants were asked to point out the central or prototypical colors of each of their color terms, and their identifications were remarkably consistent.

So color vocabulary is some function of color perception.

 

[untermensche]

The colors humans experience have evolutionary value.

They arbitrarily exist because they grant a survival advantage. They only exist as something experienced.

That humans attach labels to what they experience is not very surprising.

That humans most likely experience the same or very similar colors is not very surprising.

I'm not sure why these studies were needed or how they matter.

 

[lpetrich]

untermensche, that's not really saying anything. It's very general, and it does not address anything specific.

I tried to have specific details.

I'll do my previous development list in colors, by doing BBCoded ASCII art.

1. # # # . # # #
2. # . # # . # # #
3. # . # . # . # # # ___ # . # # . # # . # ___ # . # . # # # . #
4. # . # . # . # . # # ___ # . # . # . # # . # ___ # . # . # # . # . #
5. # . # . # . # . # . #

This imprecision of generic color terms is mainly documented for people living in recent preindustrial societies, but it is also evident in color words in past societies. In 1858, British politician William Gladstone wrote  Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, in which he pointed out a shortage of color words in Homer's epics. He concluded that their authors mainly distinguished colors as light vs. dark. He also claimed that "the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age." But this research into color terms shows that this shortage of generic color terms is typical of early development of color vocabulary.

If one has imprecise generic color terms, one can nevertheless use such expedients as leaf-colored for green and sky-colored for blue. In fact, that's the origin of some generic color terms, like "orange".

This color-term imprecision likely explains the "red" of red hair and Mars as the Red Planet. They look orange to me, and an imprecise "red" would include orange.

 

[untermensche]

This is so much about nothing.

Humans attach labels to the things they experience.

If a society has cows there will be a word for cow.

 

[Angry Floof]

This is so much about nothing.

Humans attach labels to the things they experience.

If a society has cows there will be a word for cow.

It's not nothing to cognitive scientists and linguists. Understanding the intricacies and subtleties of cognition and language is massively important to understanding ourselves, no matter how insignificant a specific area of study might seem to you.

It's easy (and quite frankly, lazy, the default response to subtlety) to dismiss this kind of intense focus and study of cognitive subtleties, but they do lead to useful understanding, even it that understanding is missed at first glance. Language lives deep in the grooves of our neural pathways. It's not just a top layer, superficial representation of experience. Language is deeply enmeshed in experience.

For example, the verbal thought "I am angry" is a different cognitive experience from "I feel anger," and even more different from something like "There is anger here," without regard to the sense of self.

It only seems insignificant because it's largely subconscious and requires a deeper level of self reflection to notice than our everyday human social use of language demands.

Did you ever repeat a word over and over until it sounds foreign and meaningless? That's the conscious experience of the undoing of those subconscious mechanisms of meaning-creation. Even if it doesn't seem useful to you to understand it this way, at the very least it is weird and fascinating and gives you a peek at the mysterious machinations of language.

If you're not a total geek about such things, just keep scrolling, as they say.

 

[lpetrich]

So far, I've found these languages with additional words for light blue:

• Russian Words for Colors - Red, blue, green, pink, etc. Colors in Russian - Picture Dictionary
• Italian Vocabulary: Colors
• Hebrew Words, Vocabulary, Colors in Hebrew Colors in Hebrew: EnchantedLearning.com
• How to Say the Colors in Greek

Modern Greek has a lot more color words than its forebear of some 3000 years ago, Homeric Greek.

Ancient Color Categories Abstract color names emerged gradually, from names of precious materials. That paper mentioned the curiosity that in ancient Egyptian, "red" was often used for strongly colored in the sense of high saturation. Also mentions that being shiny was a common color category in antiquity.

I looked for Proto-Indo-European color vocabulary, and I found Reconstructionroto-Indo-European/h₁rewdʰ- - Wiktionary. It mentioned four colors with reconstructible IE roots: white, black, red, and yellow/green. Words for "brown" and "gray" may also date back to then, though English "blue" has such cognates as Latin flâvus "yellow" and Russian belyj "white".

 

[untermensche]

This is so much about nothing.

Humans attach labels to the things they experience.

If a society has cows there will be a word for cow.

It's not nothing to cognitive scientists and linguists. Understanding the intricacies and subtleties of cognition and language is massively important to understanding ourselves, no matter how insignificant a specific area of study might seem to you.

There is nothing more intricate here than: If it can be experienced by humans they are likely to attach a label to it.

If a human sees an elephant it is likely to attach a label to it.

 

[Angry Floof]

So far, I've found these languages with additional words for light blue:

• Russian Words for Colors - Red, blue, green, pink, etc. Colors in Russian - Picture Dictionary
• Italian Vocabulary: Colors
• Hebrew Words, Vocabulary, Colors in Hebrew Colors in Hebrew: EnchantedLearning.com
• How to Say the Colors in Greek

Modern Greek has a lot more color words than its forebear of some 3000 years ago, Homeric Greek.

Ancient Color Categories Abstract color names emerged gradually, from names of precious materials. That paper mentioned the curiosity that in ancient Egyptian, "red" was often used for strongly colored in the sense of high saturation. Also mentions that being shiny was a common color category in antiquity.

I looked for Proto-Indo-European color vocabulary, and I found Reconstructionroto-Indo-European/h₁rewdʰ- - Wiktionary. It mentioned four colors with reconstructible IE roots: white, black, red, and yellow/green. Words for "brown" and "gray" may also date back to then, though English "blue" has such cognates as Latin flâvus "yellow" and Russian belyj "white".

It's also interesting that the Japanese language only recently acquired a word for green, where they used the word for blue for both blue and green before.

This is so much about nothing.

Humans attach labels to the things they experience.

If a society has cows there will be a word for cow.

It's not nothing to cognitive scientists and linguists. Understanding the intricacies and subtleties of cognition and language is massively important to understanding ourselves, no matter how insignificant a specific area of study might seem to you.

There is nothing more intricate here than: If it can be experienced by humans they are likely to attach a label to it.

If a human sees an elephant it is likely to attach a label to it.

You're right. Nothing more to see here.

 

[lpetrich]

Now for how this color-word acquisition sequence might have originated.

For that, we consider color vision in general. In the animal kingdom, color vision emerged twice, in arthropods and in vertebrates. Honeybees, for instance, can see yellow-green, blue, and near ultraviolet, and many vertebrates, like birds, can see red, green, blue, and UV. However, most mammalian color vision is limited to yellow and blue, with red to green lumped as yellow. Yes, that's what dogs and cats see. This is likely a result of having nocturnal ancestors back in the Mesozoic.

But some 30 - 35 million years ago, in some early Old World simian, a chromosome-copying accident gave one of its X chromosomes an extra copy of its yellow-receptor gene. In that simian's descendants, the genes suffered different mutations, diverging in what parts of the spectrum that they are most sensitive to. One of them became more sensitive to red light, the other more sensitive to green light. Thus producing three different color receptors. Among the descendants of those simians are us, with our color vision.


 Opponent process is a theory of how human color vision works:

• R = red or long-wavelength
• G = green or mid-wavelength
• B = blue or short-wavelength
• Y = R + G = yellow
• L = Y + B = luma
• R - G = red-green chroma
• Y - B = yellow-blue chroma

Note how R and G are together, closer than B is to them. This agrees with their close relation, the result of some gene duplication some 35 million years ago.

Applying it to the Berlin-Kay sequence, I find:

1. (L hi + Y-B hi) (Y-B lo + L lo)
2. (L hi) (Y-B hi) (Y-B lo + L lo)
3. (L hi) (Y-B hi R-G hi) (Y-B hi R-G lo) (Y-B lo + L lo)
4. (L hi) (Y-B hi R-G hi) (Y-B hi R-G lo) (Y-B lo) (L lo)

Basic Color Terms&Categories proposes that it indeed fits.

 

[untermensche]

It's also interesting that the Japanese language only recently acquired a word for green, where they used the word for blue for both blue and green before.

What does it mean?

 

[Angry Floof]

It's also interesting that the Japanese language only recently acquired a word for green, where they used the word for blue for both blue and green before.

What does it mean?

Loren would be able to answer that better than I can, but you've made it clear that you're not actually interested anyway.

 

[untermensche]

It's also interesting that the Japanese language only recently acquired a word for green, where they used the word for blue for both blue and green before.

What does it mean?

Loren would be able to answer that better than I can, but you've made it clear that you're not actually interested anyway.

I would love to know what it means.

Again, what do we have here more than the idea that if a human can experience something they can also attach a label to it?

Is black a color?

 

[Angry Floof]

Loren would be able to answer that better than I can, but you've made it clear that you're not actually interested anyway.

I would love to know what it means.

Again, what do we have here more than the idea that if a human can experience something they can also attach a label to it?

Is black a color?

Well, I explained a bit of that in my earlier post. If you think there is nothing more to this topic than a dismissive "humans apply meaning and words to stuff, yawn," then you are free to scroll by. I'm not here to educate you just because I responded intelligently to your initial knee-jerk dismissal of the OP.

 

[untermensche]

Loren would be able to answer that better than I can, but you've made it clear that you're not actually interested anyway.

I would love to know what it means.

Again, what do we have here more than the idea that if a human can experience something they can also attach a label to it?

Is black a color?

Well, I explained a bit of that in my earlier post. If you think there is nothing more to this topic than a dismissive "humans apply meaning and words to stuff, yawn," then you are free to scroll by. I'm not here to educate you just because I responded intelligently to your knee-jerk dismissal of the OP.

I'm asking what more is there.

 

[Angry Floof]

Well, I explained a bit of that in my earlier post. If you think there is nothing more to this topic than a dismissive "humans apply meaning and words to stuff, yawn," then you are free to scroll by. I'm not here to educate you just because I responded intelligently to your knee-jerk dismissal of the OP.

I'm asking what more is there.

Well, then, just develop a bit of curiosity about it and stop goading people who are.

 

[untermensche]

Well, I explained a bit of that in my earlier post. If you think there is nothing more to this topic than a dismissive "humans apply meaning and words to stuff, yawn," then you are free to scroll by. I'm not here to educate you just because I responded intelligently to your knee-jerk dismissal of the OP.

I'm asking what more is there.

Well, then, just develop a bit of curiosity about it and stop goading people who are.

I'm asking you.

 

[repoman]

How would color deficient people (most of them missing the green cone or having the green cone shifted red or red cone shifted green) affect this?

I guess that I am missing quite a bit of color gradations compared to other people and can't read an electrical resistor or pass a color blind test to save my life. At least I can actually tell what the major colors in the rainbow are.

What if there was a ruler who was strongly color blind and who decided to limit the amount of colors?

 

[untermensche]

All any person today can do with a color experience is attach a label to it.

Nothing has evolved about the human ability to attach a label.

Labels of different languages are different.

The same thing has a different label in different languages not the same label.

 

[lpetrich]

How would color deficient people (most of them missing the green cone or having the green cone shifted red or red cone shifted green) affect this?

There are not enough of such people to make much of a difference, and even if there were, then there will still be plenty of people who have good color vision.

What if there was a ruler who was strongly color blind and who decided to limit the amount of colors?

Limit the amount of color words? I think that he might be perplexed that his subjects could distinguish objects that he can't. Color blindness was first recognized in 1798, which a certain John Dalton discovered that he had color-deficient vision. He was the John Dalton who worked out atomic weights.

I would love to know what it means.

Again, what do we have here more than the idea that if a human can experience something they can also attach a label to it?

Is black a color?

It says something about how human visual perception works, what colors that are the most prominent in our visual perception, and which colors that we consider important to distinguish.

 

[untermensche]

I would love to know what it means.

Again, what do we have here more than the idea that if a human can experience something they can also attach a label to it?

Is black a color?

It says something about how human visual perception works, what colors that are the most prominent in our visual perception, and which colors that we consider important to distinguish.

It says nothing about how anything works.

It is all about how things are experienced.

How colors are experienced is not known.