Color naming across languages
Kay, Paul, Brent Berlin, Luisa Maffi, and William Merrifield
in C.L Hardin and L. Maffi (eds.)
Color Categories in Thought and Language, Cambridge. 1997
dalla pagina icsi di Paul Kay:
“1 . Introduction: Prior cross-linguistic research on color naming This chapter summarizes some of the research on cross-linguistic color categorization and naming that has addressed issues raised in Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berlin and Kay 1969, hereafter B&K). It then advances some speculations regarding future developments—especially regarding the analysis, now in progress, of the data of the World Color Survey (hereafter WCS). In the latter respect the chapter serves as something of a progress report on the current state of analysis of the WCS data, as well as a promissory note on the full analysis to come. B&K proposed two general hypotheses about basic color terms and the categories they name:
(1) there is a restricted universal inventory of such categories;
(2) a language adds basic color terms in a constrained order, interpreted as an evolutionary sequence.