Orð og tunga - 01.06.2013, Side 151

Kirsten Wolf
Basic Color Terms in Old Norse-
Icelandic: A Quantitative Study
1 Introduction
In 1969, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay published their analysis of color
terms in close to one hundred of the world's languages, arguing that
there was a universal inventory of eleven basic color terms, located in
the color space where English speakers place the most typical exam-
ples of black, white, red, orange, yellow, brown, green, blue, purple,
pink, and grey. Comparing the vocabularies of languages possessing
fewer than these eleven color terms, they maintained that basic color
terms do not appear haphazardly in the diachronic development of
a language, but that a language adds basic color terms in a particular
order, which is interpreted as an evolutionary sequence:
Stage I: black, white
Stage II: black, white, red
Stage Illa: black, white, red, green
Stage Illb: black white, red, yellow
Stage IV: black, white, red, yellow, green
Stage V: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue
Stage VI: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown
Stage VII: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown,
purple, pink, orange, grey.
Since the publication of Berlin and Kay's study, there has been some
elaboration and criticism of their conclusions, and in response to
these, the two linguist-anthropologists have modified them. In 1975,
Orð og tunga 15 (2013), 141-161. © Stofnun Arna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum,
Reykjavík.