Reprinted from LANGUAGE AND SPEECH 1974 Vol. 17, Part 4, pp. 377-402
R. M. ALLOTT University of Oxford
Survey of colour-names in many different languages shows that there is a greater resemblance between them in geographically distant and unrelated languages than can plausibly be explained as the result of chance, borrowing or hitherto unsuspected language relationships. This suggests a universal tendency for there to be a relation between the meaning, the percept and the phonological form which does not operate absolutely but tends to restrict the sounds used and increase the probability that certain patterns of words will be found for certain percepts, particularly where the percepts are sharply defined and uniformly recognized.
The starting point for this article is the excellent study by Berlin and Kay (1969) published under the title Basic Color Terms, their Universality and Evolution'. The direction and conclusion of that study can be described briefly as follows. Current doctrine in linguistics and anthropology holds that each language and culture expresses a unique world view by its particular way Of slicing up reality into named categories. This doctrine emphasizes the difficulty of word-for-word translations between languages, and interprets this difficulty as evidence that each language (and culture) predisposes its bearers to see the world in terms different from those employed by other languages (and cultures). The typical example of this tenet, which appears most frequently in texts on linguistics and anthropology, is colour vocabulary. According to accepted doctrine, words for basic colours are not translatable across languages; each language encodes colour perceptions into basic colour words (e.g. white, black, red) in a way that is totally arbitrary with respect to comparable encoding in other unrelated languages. However, on the basis of a careful linguistic and psychophysical investigation in ninety-eight languages of diverse language families, this traditional doctrine is rejected. Berlin and Kay find that eleven psychophysically defined colours serve as the perceptual focal points of all the basic colour words in all the languages of the world. This set of eleven psychophysically defined percepts thus constitutes a substantive semantic universal. Basic colour words are translatable. Furthermore though it has no particular relevance for this article, they found that words for the basic colours arose in different languages in a particular sequence: so all languages with only two basic colour words have words for black and white; languages with exactly three basic colour words have words for black, white and red and so on. They interpret this ordering as an evolutionary one.