PIE brown/Berlin &Kay

Dr. John E. McLaughlin mclasutt at brigham.net
Thu Mar 16 17:35:00 UTC 2000


Steve Long wrote a long reply to my last posting about color terms, but we
are actually saying very similar things.  Steve states that just because a
language doesn't have a word for 'brown', it doesn't mean that they can't
see brown or have no brown in their environment or just never talk about
brown things.  He used an excellent example in citing, "It's the color of
mud."  Another example would be, "It's mud red" (in languages without a
basic term for 'brown', brown things generally fall into either the 'red'
range or the 'yellow' range).  I completely agree with Steve on this.

Secondly, Steve asks what the Berlin and Kay work means in terms of defining
a spectrum and he disagrees with defining color terms in other languages by
reference to the way that English breaks up the spectrum.  Here we have a
slight difference of opinion.  Steve seems to object to using 'red',
'yellow', 'blue', etc. to "translate" foreign basic color terms because they
imply a specific English-based range of the spectrum and eliminate colors
that include other parts of the spectrum.  I agree with the difficulty of
defining, say, the range of the spectrum that falls under Panamint ankapihty
(y is barred i) using only the English term 'red'.  Ankapihty includes
colors from dark yellow through orange and red into a medium purple, but we
have no word for that range in English.  However, we can locate the general
spectral range where the "center of balance" is.  That center is in the
range we call 'red'.  Obviously, a dictionary should list the range of
colors and not just the central color.  Indeed, I've run informal tests on
English speaking students in some of my Language and Culture courses.  I'd
hand them a color wheel and ask them to mark on the wheel the primary and
secondary colors 'red', 'yellow', 'orange', etc.  While the center of each
color covered the typically associated spectral range, the boundaries
differed on every wheel.  In fact, my wife and I have a fundamental
difference in what we call "pure red".  My wife identifies a dark scarlet as
"pure red" while I identify a bright crimson as "pure red".

The value of the Berlin and Kay system is not in the specific spectral
identifications it wants to make, but in the identification of color centers
in the whole spectral range by means of basic color terms that are neither
borrowed nor derived within the extant language.  The value is in looking at
the order in which the linguistic system divides the entire spectrum into
(excluding white and black) one to eight or so pieces.  It also allows us to
look at the naturalness of reconstructed systems.  A reconstruction that has
'red', 'yellow', and 'grue' (green and blue), for example, is much more
probable than a system that has 'pink', 'violet', and 'orange'.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)



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