Orð og tunga - 01.06.2013, Page 152

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Orð og tunga
Brent Berlin and Elois Ann Berlin introduced a light-warm versus
dark-cool stage instead of the earlier categorization based on bright-
ness contrast. They also suggested that the dark-cool category would
at stage Illa divide, leading to the emergence of grue (blue or green),
while the warm-light category would divide at stage Illb, leading to
the emergence of yellow. At stage IV, stage Illa systems would then
encode focal yellow, while stage Illb would encode focal grue, which
would find a focus in either blue or green. At stage V, undifferentiated
grue would divide, and the new category would encode either blue
or green. At stage VI, focal brown would emerge from the light-warm
category. At stage VII, focal purple, pink, orange, and grey would
become encoded, grey possibly early. In 1978, Paul Kay and Chad
K. McDaniel argued that grey could occur at any stage from Illa on-
ward or potentially even earlier. In 1991, Paul Kay, Brent Berlin, and
William Merrifield maintained that either brown or purple or both
often appear before the green/blue composite is dissolved, and that
there seems to be no fixed order in the temporal appearance of the
two color terms. And in 2007, Terry Regier, Paul Kay, and Naveen
Khetarpal argued against the view that color categories are organized
around universal focal colors and in favor of K. A. Jamesson and R.
G. D'Andrade's earlier proposal that "color naming is determined in
part by general principles of categorization partitioning an irregular-
ly shaped color solid" (1441).
Old Norse-Icelandic has eight basic color terms (svartr, hvítr, rauðr,
grœnn, gulr, blár, brúnn, grár), making it an early stage VII language
(Wolf 2006). Recent analyses have largely supported Berlin and Kay's
evolutionary sequence, though it has been argued that grey (grár)
should be assigned an early stage, either stage III or stage IV (Wolf
2009), that blue (blár) should be assigned a late stage (Wolf 2006), that
green (grænn) should be assigned a stage earlier than yellow (gulr)
(Wolf 2009), and that brown (brúnn) should be assigned a fairly late
stage, probably as late as blue (Wolf [forthcoming]).
The purpose of this article is a quantitative analysis of basic color
terms in Old Norse-Icelandic literature in order to explore, if there is
a correlation between the amended version for Old Norse-Icelandic
of Berlin and Kay's sequence and the frequencies of svartr, hvítr, rauðr,
grœnn, gulr, blár, brúnn, and grár. It is, of course, recognized that there
nray not necessarily be a correlation between synchronic frequencies
of usage and diachronic stage of introduction, and Berlin and Kay's
original hypothesis does not predict such a correlation. After all, their