Biocultural Implications of Systems of Color Naming

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Abstract
Preliminary analysis of color naming data from 111 languages in the World Color Survey confirms the main lines of the original Berlin and Kay hypothesis regarding the existence of semantic universals in basic color lexicons. The analysis further shows that visual physiology plays a role in the evolutionary development of basic color vocabularies, constraining the possible composite categories to a small number of those theoretically possible. One composite category, yellow/green, is clearly attested in the data, but the sequence leading to its emergence remains unknown.

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