PIE brown/Berlin &Kay

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/13/2000 10:55:36 AM, mclasutt at brigham.net wrote:

>Steve Long has doubts about the value of the Berlin and Kay color research,
>but in my experience, I've found more value in their work that in the work
>of others on the same line.  Sure, their work may not be perfect, but in the
>absence of another system, that's the one we've got.

Just a note on this. My doubts about Berlin & Kay are not singular, as I
pointed out with citations in my earlier post.  Ther has been some very heavy
duty criticisms of B&K.  And at the core of many of those doubts, there's
also the question of what it is exactly that the "system" does.

It should be pointed out that in their original study, B&K found that by far
most of the languages they studied DID NOT have a full complement of the
basic color terms.

Of 98 languages, nine only had terms for black and white and 47 languages
only had four "basic color terms."  And a whopping 65 did not even make it to
"stage VI" and therefore did not have a "BCT" for "brown."  ( The description
of these languages "lacking" a full complement include "New Guinea, Congo,
South India, Amerindian, African, Pacific, Australian Aboriginal, South
India, African, Philippine, Polynesian, Sumatra, Eskimo" - and of course my
favorite, Homeric Greek.)

Now, it seems reasonable to me to ask what this may prove about the above
languages.  Is it that they had no way of communicating that an object was
certain colors - so that one speaker of these languages would NOT immediately
know what color the other was referring to?  Even if they lack a BCT for that
color?

That is unlikely.  My quess is that all or most of these languages permitted
their speakers to refer to and communicate regarding a specific color without
suffering much due to the absence of a "basic color term" for that color.

If I told you that something was the color of "mud" - we might have no word
for dark brown, but you would know what color to look for.  If
"looks-like-mud" became our regular word for dark brown and "looks-like-a
tanned-hide" became our regular word for light brown, we still might not have
a word for "brown" in general, but we might get along just dandy anyway.

In actuality, what B&K seem to be asking is whether a language has a word for
B&K's definition of brown - a specific arc of nanometers on the color
spectrum.

My guess is that these languages had very effective ways of communicating
about colors.  I'm mindful of something Mr. Stirling wrote:

<<-- ah, no word for the color "brown".  Brown things didn't exist then,
perhaps?>>

Quite obviously, the world can be a very brown place depending on location
and season.  Are we to assume that these languages in their state of
"evolution" (B&K's term) never had occasion to refer to the colors of all the
basic brown things out there - from dirt and wood and cooked meat to the hide
color of many if not most animals?  I suspect that everything could be
described in terms of color attributes, but that they just didn't match B&K's
grouping of colored attributes. (Cf., the typical Roman precision in "color
inter aquilium candidumque".)

What B&K were apparently doing was rating languages on whether they had
generalized a variety of colored attributes under a specific set of names.
And that specific set of names - "basic color terms" - refers not so much to
the evolution of the language as it does to the evolution of the science and
technology of color - where the color spectrum - along with white and black -
divide up neatly into just about 11 bands of visible light.  This is a recent
idea.

So, going back to the question of what it is exactly that the "system" does?

>From this point of view, it seems to be a way of accounting for why some
languages just do not seem to match our modern technical system of color
names.  And why some languages more or less do not match our system of
dividing up colors.

And the answer is "evolution."  This explanation for the relative absence of
matching "modern" categorizations in "non-westernized" languages, however,
can be seen from one perspective as both anachronistic and artificial and
therefore basically uninformative.

Regards,
Steve Long