Researchers develop algorithm to map words to colors across languages
Sep 2021, phys.org
"Linking almost all languages, however, is an emphasis on communicating about warm colors—reds and yellows—that are known to draw the human eye and that correspond with the colors of ripe fruits in primate diets."
The chart above shows how colors with high communicative needs matched the colors of ripe fruits in primate diets. Credit: Colin Twomey, 2021.
"The study relied on a robust dataset known as the World Color Survey, collected more than 50 years ago by anthropologist Brent Berlin and linguist Paul Kay. Traveling to 130 linguistic communities worldwide, Berlin and Kay presented native speakers with the same 330 color chips. They found that even completely different languages tended to group colors in roughly the same way. What's more, when they asked speakers to identify the focal color of a particular named color—the "reddest red" or "greenest green"—speakers' choices were highly similar across languages."
The World Color Survey has been revisited, this time with algorithms. They used the extreme examples such as reddest-reds and greenest-greens from all the 130 languages, got a signal, and then validated it against the ways each language divided the color spectrum. That was enough to get the same results of Berlin and Kay. A bit more quantitative -- reds and yellows have "30-fold greater demand".
And Colin Twomey asks further:
"This is something that could be carried to other systems where there is a need to divide up some cognitive space," says , "whether it's sound, weight, temperature, or something else." [Like odor molecules perhaps?]
via University of Pennsylvania's MindCORE program and the School of Arts & Sciences' Biology Department: What we talk about when we talk about colors, PNAS (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2109237118
Post Script:
"Smells, unlike colors, do not have names of their own: they are always identified by what they are smells of."
Notes:
- Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. 1969, Berkeley
- Paul Kay and Chad K. McDaniel, The Linguistic Significance and the Meanings of Basic Color Terms, Language 54, 1978
- Cultural Evolution of Basic Color Terms, 2012. https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/07/cultural-evolution-of-basic-color-terms.html
- Seeing Red, 2013. https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2013/06/seeing-red.html
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