scholarly journals Samspil máls og merkingar. Um litaheiti í íslensku táknmáli

Orð og tunga ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 75-100
Author(s):  
Þórhalla Guðmundsdóttir Beck ◽  
Matthew James Whelpton
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Colour Space ◽  
British English ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Basic Colour ◽  
Basic Color ◽  
The Many ◽  
Basic Color Terms ◽  
Colour Terms

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay brought a sea change in semantic studies of colour terms when they published their book Basic Color Terms in 1969. Up to that point the dominant view was that each language represented a unique conceptual organisation of the world, a view supported by the fact that the colour spectrum is a continuum which provides not obvious breaks for the purposes of naming. Despite the many criticisms of their work which have followed, their methodology has proven extremely influential and been widely adopted. The project Evolution of Semantic Systems, 2011–2012, adopted their methodology for a study of colour terms in the Indo-European languages and the Colours in Context project applied the same methods to a study of Icelandic Sign Language. Signed languages diff er in many ways from spoken languages but the results of this study suggest the broad organisation of the colour space is the same in Icelandic Sign Language, Icelandic and British English. The colour space is organised by a few dominant terms, largely the same as Berlin and Kay ́s original basic colour terms. Yet within that broad pattern is considerable microvariation, especially in the spaces between the dominant terms. There the characteristic patt erns of word formation in the language have a clear influence in colour naming strategies.

scholarly journals From Yellow to Blue — or Not?

2015 ◽  
pp. 47-52
Author(s):  
Svetlana Kleyner ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Stage Iv ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Black Spots ◽  
Primary Meaning ◽  
Basic Color ◽  
Basic Color Terms ◽  
Colour Terms ◽  
European Group

In Indo-European languages, the reflexes of PIE root *ĝhel- are typically used as colour terms for ‘yellow’ or to denote yellow objects like gold. In Slavic languages there are no less than three different reflexes (e.g. Russian желтый, зеленый and голубой). While the original root is traditionally thought to have had the primary meaning ‘yellow’, there is nothing unusual in the fact that the root often acquires the meaning ‘green’, as PIE was almost certainly a language where green and yellow were not distinguished on the level of basic color terms. The fact that some reflexes expanded into the blue part of the spectrum, although it has a parallel in another PIE root (Lat. flauus ‘yellow’ vs PGmc *blēwa- ‘blue’), seems rather interesting. A similar semantic transition of *ĝhel- can be seen in Celtic languages (e.g. OIr gel and glas). But while in Celtic there could have been two reflexes of the same root, one of which stayed in place and the other drifted away as Proto-Celtic evolved into a Stage IV language, the Balto-Slavic word cannot be so easily explained away: both голубой and its Baltic cognates (Lith. gelumbe ‘blue cloth’, OPruss. golimban ‘blue’), unlike the words for ‘green’, ‘yellow’ and ‘gold’ in the same languages, have retained the unpalatalized *gh-. While by no means a borrowing from Lat. columba, the Balto-Slavic lexeme does share the word-formation with columba and Grk. κóλυμβος ‘little grebe’ – the words that are traditionally connected with the cluster of Lat. calidus ‘with spots’, Grk. κηλίς, OIr caile ‘a spot’, OInd. kāla- ‘(blue-)black’ etc. Here a different version is proposed: neither are columba and κóλυμβος connected with the aforementioned ‘black spots’ cluster, nor is голубой connected with PIE *ĝhel-; they represent a separate and possibly non-Indo-European group of cognates.

scholarly journals Colour terms in Russian: reflections of typological constraints in a single language

1988 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greville Corbett ◽  
Gerry Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Color Terms ◽  
Basic Colour ◽  
History Of ◽  
Basic Color ◽  
Fixed Order ◽  
Basic Color Terms ◽  
Colour Terms

One of the milestones in typological studies is Berlin & Kay's (1969) account of basic colour terms, which has produced a steady stream of research of various types. Berlin & Kay summarized their work as follows.In sum, our two major findings indicate that the referents for the basic color terms of all languages appear to be drawn from a set of eleven universal perceptual categories, and these categories become encoded in the history of a given language in a partially fixed order (1969: 4–5).

scholarly journals Basic colour terms in five Finno-Ugric languages and Estonian Sign Language: a comparative study

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mari Uusküla ◽  
Liivi Hollman ◽  
Urmas Sutrop
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Naming Task ◽  
Field Method ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Compound Words ◽  
Rich Variety ◽  
Basic Colour ◽  
Dominant Colour ◽  
Colour Terms ◽  
Cognitive Salience

In this paper we compare five Finno-Ugric languages – Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Udmurt and Komi-Zyrian – and the Estonian Sign Language (unclassified) in different aspects: established basic colour terms, the proportion of basic colour terms and different colour terms in the collected word-corpora, the cognitive salience index values in the list task and the number of dominant colour tiles in the colour naming task. The data was collected, using the field method of Davies and Corbett, from all languages under consideration, providing a distinctive foundation for linguistic comparison. We argue that Finno-Ugric languages seem to possess relatively large colour vocabularies, especially due to their rich variety of word-formation types, e.g. the composition of compound words. All of the languages under consideration have developed to Stage VI or VII, possessing 7 to 11 lexicalised basic colour terms. The cognitive salience index helps to distinguish primary and secondary basic colour terms, showing certain comprehensive patterns which are similar to Russian and English.

Is the Acquisition of Basic-Colour Terms in Young Children Constrained?

Perception ◽  
10.1068/p3405 ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 31 (11) ◽  
pp. 1349-1370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola J Pitchford ◽  
Kathy T Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Naming Task ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Matching Task ◽  
Basic Colour ◽  
Basic Color ◽  
Colour Term ◽  
Reliable Knowledge ◽  
Time Frames ◽  
Basic Color Terms ◽  
Colour Terms

We investigated whether the learning of colour terms in childhood is constrained by a developmental order of acquisition as predicted by Berlin and Kay [1969 Basic Color Terms (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press)]. Forty-three children, aged between 2 and 5 years and grouped according to language ability, were given two tasks testing colour conceptualisation. Colour comprehension was assessed in a spoken-word-to-colour-matching task in which a target colour was presented in conjunction with two distractor colours. Colour naming was measured in an explicit naming task in which colours were presented individually for oral naming. Results showed that children's knowledge of basic-colour terms varied across tasks and language age, providing little support for a systematic developmental order. In addition, we found only limited support for an advantage for the conceptualisation of primary (red, green, blue, yellow, black, white) compared to non-primary colour terms across tasks and language age. Instead, our data suggest that children acquire reliable knowledge of nine basic colours within a 3-month period (35.6 to 39.5 months) after which there is a considerable lag of up to 9 months before accurate knowledge of the final two colours (brown and grey) is acquired. We propose that children acquire colour term knowledge in two distinct time frames that reflect the establishment of, first, the exterior (yellow, blue, black, green, white, pink, orange, red, and purple) and, second, the interior structure (brown and grey) of conceptual colour space. These results fail to provide significant support for the order predicted by Berlin and Kay, and suggest, instead, that the development of colour term knowledge is largely unconstrained.

scholarly journals Basic Color Terms in Estonian Sign Language

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-157
Author(s):  
Liivi Hollman ◽  
Urmas Sutrop
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Color Terms ◽  
Basic Color ◽  
Basic Color Terms

scholarly journals Differences in the distribution of colour terms in colour space in the Russian, Udmurt and Komi languages

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Ryabina
Keyword(s):  
Field Method ◽  
Colour Space ◽  
Colour Perception ◽  
Light Blue ◽  
Pink Colour ◽  
Basic Colour ◽  
Space Data ◽  
Colour Terms

This article compares data of Russian, Udmurt and Komi on the distribution of colour terms in Ostwald’s colour space. Data of Russian derive from an article by Davies and Corbett (1994). Data from Udmurt and Komi were originally collected by using the field method suggested for establishing basic colour terms by Davies and Corbett (1994, 1995). Sixty-five coloured tiles were used as stimuli. It was found that the distribution of colour terms differed even in closely related languages. In addition, there are differences in the distribution of the pink colour in the Southern and Northern dialects of Udmurt. It can be argued that the distribution of colour terms in colour space is language-specific and dependent on culture. The data on unrelated languages showed that colour perception by Northern Udmurt subjects, compared to that by Southern Udmurts, was more influenced by Russian. Udmurt, like Russian, possesses a term for light blue, which in the Northern dialect was located in the same part of colour space as in Russian

Indo-European Basic Colour Terms

1979 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Shields
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental System ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Universal System ◽  
Color Term ◽  
Basic Colour ◽  
Color Categories ◽  
Basic Color ◽  
Universal Order ◽  
Colour Terms

Berlin and Kay (1969) present strong evidence that “all languages share a universal system of basic colour categorization” and that “the basic color-term inventories of most languages expand through time by lexicalizing these categories in a highly constrained, universal order” (Kay and McDaniel 1978:610). The validity of these conclusions has also been demonstrated by Collier et al. (1976) and by Kay and McDaniel (1978). The evolutionary process identified by Berlin and Kay can be represented schematically as follows:where the arrow may be read ‘is encoded before’ (Kay and McDaniel 1978: 615). In other words, languages proceed through a series of stages in the development of their basic colour-term lexicon, with the most simplistic system containing only terms for white (light) and black (dark). Any expansion of this fundamental system will first result in the addition of a term for red and then in the addition of a term for green or yellow. If further expansion takes place, “yellow or green, whichever did not emerge at the previous stage, now emerges” (Berlin and Kay 1969:18), followed by terms for blue and brown. When a system develops beyond Stage VI, “there is a rapid expansion to the full roster of eleven basic color categories,” although no particular order of appearance among terms for purple, pink, orange, or gray has been ascertained (Berlin and Kay 1969:21-22).

scholarly journals The basic colour terms of Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian and their typological relevance

2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-92
Author(s):  
Andrew Hippisley ◽  
Ian Davies ◽  
Greville G. Corbett
Keyword(s):  
Derived Categories ◽  
Colour Space ◽  
Basic Colour ◽  
Colour Term ◽  
Diachronic Development ◽  
Colour Terms

Berlin & Kay’s basic colour term framework claims that there is an ordering in the diachronic development of languages’ colour systems. One generalisation is that primary colours, WHITE, BLACK, RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, are lexical­ised before derived colours, which are perceptual blends, e.g. ORANGE is the blend of YELLOW and RED. The colour systems of Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian offer an important typological contribution. It is already known that primary colour space can contract upon the emergence of a basic derived term; our findings indicate that derived categories also shift as colour systems develop. Tsakhur offers corroborating evidence.

The terms brun and marron in modern standard French

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Forbes
Keyword(s):  
Color Terms ◽  
Basic Colour ◽  
Single Colour ◽  
Colour Category ◽  
Basic Color ◽  
Structuralist View ◽  
Basic Color Terms ◽  
Modern Standard

My main purpose here is to examine the basic colour vocabulary of modern standard French in the light of recent research on colour vocabularies and in particular to account for the fact that two highly salient terms, brun and marron, are used to designate a single colour category which I shall call BROWN. (The notion of saliency is defined in § 1.2 below.) Before the publication in 1969 of Berlin and Kay's Basic color terms with its universalist hypothesis, the fact that the English term brown has no one equivalent term in French would generally have been regarded as evidence for the structuralist view that languages are anisomorphic in their semantic structures (Lyons, 1968). Linguists before 1969 turned to colour vocabularies to demonstrate not only that languages are anisomorphic in their semantic structures but that the colour continuum is cut up in a completely arbitrary way in different languages (Hjelmslev, 1943; Gleason, 1955). Recent research, however, suggests that some modification of this view may be necessary.

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