Orð og tunga - 01.06.2010, Side 119

Kirsten Wolf
Towards a Diachronic Analysis
of Old Norse-Icelandic Color Terms:
The Cases of Green and Yellow
1 Introduction
In their landmark cross-cultural study Basic Color Terms (1969), Brent
Berlin and Paul Kay argue that color terms are added to languages
across the world in a fixed order, and that this order is universal in
nature. They identify eleven basic color categories and maintain that
these are mapped systematically to the corresponding color terms of
a given language. The basic color categories (named in English as red,
green, blue, yellow, black, white, grey, pink, orange, purple, and brown) are
considered distinct from other terms, because they are known to all
members of a community, not contextually restricted, not subsumed
within another category, and generally named with mono-lexemic
words. According to their hypothesis, all languages possess basic
terms for the black and white foci; if a language contains three terms,
then it contains a term for red; if a language contains four terms, then
the fourth term will be either yellow or green; if a language contains
five terms, then it contains terms for both yellow and green; if a lan-
guage contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue; if a language
contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown; and if a lan-
Orð og tunga 12 (2010), 109-130. © Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum
fræðum, Reykjavík.