PIE brown/Berlin &Kay

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/6/2000 6:32:12 PM, mclasutt at brigham.net wrote:

>Being an outsider to serious PIE work, where do the earliest attested
>Indo-European languages and PIE fall on the Berlin and Kay color scale?
>This is an important thing to know before discussing whether 'bear' >
>'brown' or vice versa.  Ultimately, 'brown' should be traced to something
>non-color (since it's a VERY late color term to develop), but did this
>happen before, during, or after PIE?  If there isn't a full range of
>white/light, black/dark, red, yellow, green, and blue, then we can't really
>expect 'brown' and perhaps the PIE term reconstructed 'brown' might better
>be reconstructed 'bear' with the understanding that the development of
>'bear-colored' to 'brown' might be very early....

>To reiterate my earlier questions, where do the earliest IE languages stand
>on the Berlin and Kay scale?  Where does PIE stand?

Some points about Berlin and Kay might be helpful here.

1. The original B&K conclusion in Basic Color Terms (1969) was - if you had
11 or less color terms in your language, they would be present pretty much in
the same order no matter what the language was - or at least for the speakers
of the original 98 living languages they studied.  These are from some notes:
 <<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... B&K 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.>>

I see B&K had brown as #7, after blue, so that if you had seven or more
"basic color terms" in your language, you'd have brown.

2.  B & K based all categorization on what they felt defined "basic color
terms", so there were a lot of languages that didn't get as high as level 7
brown - mostly non-European languages - and I see that in my notes that much
to my surprise they included "Homeric Greek" and made it a "stage IIIb level
language" (only four BCT's - not brown).  How many Homeric Greeks they tested
those color chips on I do not know.

3. B&K were hit heavy by conventional researchers - and even innatists had
problems with their not taking proper account of the rods and cones.  But the
heaviest hit came from the experimentalists on methodological grounds. The
targeted article was Saunders, B. A. C. & van Brakel, J. (1997). Are there
nontrivial constraints on colour categorization? Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 20 (2):167-228, and a whole series followed.

I have this note as summarizing the state of the dialogue by "Gammack and
Denby": "Classic previous studies motivated by a search for universals
constraining color terms (Berlin & Kay, 1969) have, however, had their
methodology criticized. Saunders and Van Brakel's (1997) target article and
the associated critical responses gives a good status report on the major
arguments. Berlin and Kay's later studies make some slight concessions, but
Kay and Berlin (1997) maintain the essence of their original position on
universals. The unreliability of naming as a dependent variable is one major
problem, and so attempting to design studies around some objectively
comparable standards is preferred. Colour sensations "number in excess of
7,000,000 ... [color names] are of infinite variety" (Cohen, 1969)."

4. My big problem with B&K is that they used solid-color chips.  That treats
color not as a feature of an object, but as an independent thing in itself.
This is a modern convention - a result of the color spectrum and pigment
technology - and not the way ancients saw these things until pigmentation and
color analysis became sophisticated.  (Homer didn't use the word <chroma> and
he never used a noun for a specific color - it was always an adjective or a
physical stain.  <Chroma> was a metaphorical adaption of a word for skin used
by the later Greek natural philosophers.  Words for pigments, <pharma>, mix,
I believe, were even more clearly derived from the specific sources of those
pigments.)

5.  I suppose that all 11 "basic color terms" might be reconstructed back to
*PIE, but this would really feel like an anachronism.  Just like with
wheel-words, you might find they are all there in one IE language or another.
 But the historical "semantics" just don't seem to support that with colors
at all.

Anyway - hope this helps.

Regards,
Steve Long