Further examples

Khomeriki, Kezeli and Lomashvili (2009) researched the categorical boundaries between the Georgian categories of the colours tsiteli ‘red’ and vardisperi

‘pink’, and lurji ‘blue’ and tsisperi ‘light blue’:

“Among Georgian speakers the etymology of the pink and light blue terms does not influence determination of the boundaries. For observers vardisperi (pink) and tsisperi (light blue) are merely light red and light blue. They are not asso-ciated with the components of these compounds vardi (rose) and tsa (sky).”

(Khomeriki, Kezeli and Lomashvili 2009: 139)

They conclude that the negative result of the experiment, which was done to find the categorical perception between lurji ‘blue’ and tsisperi ‘light blue’, may arise because it is difficult to choose two such very closely related colours from different categories that would have an identical perceptual boundary for a statistically significant number of subjects (Khomeriki, Kezeli and Lomashvili 2009: 139).

Several case studies that have found more than one basic level word for blue are published in Värvinimede raamat (“A book of colour terms”) edited by Mari Uusküla and Urmas Sutrop (2011). One of the cases is the Northern Udmurt language, where a Bulgarian loan chagyr ‘light blue’ is considered basic by Ryabina (2011: 263). Northern Udmurt has eight basic colour terms, ranked by Sutrop’s cognitive salience index⁶, and these are gord ‘red’, vož ‘green’, čuž

‘yellow’, lįz ‘blue’, śeˬd ‘black’, č́agįr ‘light blue’, purįś ‘grey’ and teˬdįˬ ‘white’

(Ryabina 2011):

“The inclusion of чагыр [chagyr] ‘light blue’ amongst basic color terms is an interesting phenomen, which does not correspond to the temporal-evolutionary ordering of Berlin and Kay and definitely requires further research.” (Ryabina 2011: 267)

_______________________________

6 Salience in the following tables and figures refers to the cognitive salience index designed by Urmas Sutrop (2001; 2002), which combines two list task parameters naming frequency (F) and mean position (mP) and so reflect the tendency of basic colour terms to occur at the beginning of the elicited lists, and to occur in the usage of most participants. For a detailed introduction see 1.4.1 List task.

Indeed, chagyr ‘light blue’ had a high list task (N=31) percentage of 87%, a high mean position of 7.11 and the cognitive salience index of 0.122, and in the naming task chagyr was the dominant name for the stimulus BGB T3 (Ryabina 2011: 265). This Color-Aid stimulus, BGB T3, seems to be quite likely to become dominant for light blue if the language has a high enough naming percentage for it. In fact, Ryabina proposes that in Russian and Northern Udmurt, the terms for the lighter goluboj and č́agįr had the same location in colour space, as they corresponded to colour sample BGB T3 (Ryabina 2011:

200; see also Rjabina 2011).

Lithuanian is another example of a language where light blue gained domi-nance in the naming task with Color-Aid stimulus BGB T3. Research by Pranaitytė (2011: 298) indicates that the Lithuanian žydra ‘light blue’ may be basic alongside mėlyna ‘blue’, but the language does not have a basic term designation for pink.

The most interesting examples in The World Color Survey (Kay et al. 2010) are those that provide a reasoning for why a particular term was or was not counted as a basic term. Here is the example of the Oto-Manguean language Amuzgo and how basicness was gauged in The World Color Survey:

“For blue, two terms are used by all speakers: tsa [3] and tsjo’ [2], the former being the most extensively and consistently used, while the latter is confined to naming dark blues with relatively low consensus. /---/ For tsjo’ [2], the investigator indicates that it is related to the word for ‘sky’. In spite of its general use, it is not altogether clear whether it can be considered a basic term, since it shows fairly low overall consensus in its term map, and appears only at 64%

agreement in the aggregates, when the other blue term is fully established. On the other hand, its range is not included in that of tsa [3], and most individuals who use both terms seem to make a light blue/dark blue distinction.” (Kay et al.

2010: 89–90)

There are other blue examples, e.g. Chumburu in the Niger-Congo language family, where the emerging term for blue blu, presumably borrowed from the English, is still competing with a black/blue term kidӡidӡii (Kay et al. 2010:

189); or the Nilo-Saharan language Murle, where a minority of speakers have developed nyapus ‘(light) blue’ as a term for blue that is strongly biased towards light blues, while for those speakers colai is either a clear green term or a restricted grue (Kay et al. 2010: 419).

Lin et al. (2001), who researched Taiwanese Mandarin colour terms, use the term recessive for a basic term that has a cognitive overlay with the more dominant basic term:

“The terms may take on slightly different meanings, because they name different points of view on the same perceptual reality, forming a cognitive overlay. In such a framework, only the dominant term would be basic, the recessive term nonbasic, and this would reduce the number of Mandarin basic colour terms from sixteen to eleven” (Lin et al. 2001: 47).

Their 200-sample naming task (N=60) revealed that Taiwanese Mandarin has 16 basic names, which include two reds (hong and ju), two oranges (jyu and chen), two greens (liuh and ching), two blues (lan and diann), and two browns (zong and hur), though the second term of each of the five pairs may be considered recessive, and hence not a basic name (Lin et al. 2001: 207).

An example of the opposite strategy of fitting the theory around the data comes from Wierzbicka (1996). Wierzbicka (1996: 313) cites the description of urban Thai given by Diller and Juntanamalaga (forthcoming [in 1996]), who propose two terms for blue, fáa, literally ‘sky’, and nam-ŋǝn, literally ‘silver-tarnish’, the darker blue of the Thai flag. Katemake et al. (2015) report five previous studies about Thai colour naming, three of them by linguists and written in Thai. A colour name identification process (N=20) by Engchuan (2003) also supported the occurrence of two basic blue terms in Modern Thai (Katemake et 2015). Katemake et al. (2015) report that they counted fa ‘sky blue’ among the basic colour terms because it was used to represent blue before the word nam-ngen ‘blue’ was known. The results of three experiments of colour naming show that fa ‘sky blue’ is more frequent than nam-ngen ‘blue’, which indicates that fa ‘sky blue’ might be more appropriate for consideration in the Berlin and Kay eleven basic colour terms than nam-ngen ‘blue’. (Katemake et al. 2015)

For Wierzbicka, the position of the [English] focal blue, which is supposedly determined by universal human neurophysiology, in the no man’s land between urban Thai fáa and nam-ŋǝn, “highlights the irreducible gap between neuro-physiology and meaning” (Wierzbicka 1996: 313). She speculates that sooner or later the Thais will develop a conceptual category corresponding to blue, but deems it most likely that they will follow a path similar to that of Russian (Wierzbicka 1996: 313).

Don Dedrick (1996) argues that the central problems of the theory arise from the difficulty of linking the linguistic, psychological, and physiological domains, which are conceptually and empirically disparate. Dedrick (1996) suggests that an account which stands between the biological and the cultural is the answer, rather than attributing colour naming either to biology or culture.

The blue category is not the only colour region where there could be a partition. For a possible partition of reds see Hungarian (see Maclaury, Almási and Kövecses 1997; Uusküla and Sutrop 2010; Benczes and Tóth-Czifra 2014).

The division of pink is a later addition to the research (Vejdemo et al. 2015;

Frenzel-Biamonti 2011).

This concludes the review of the literature. The next section focuses on describing the research question, followed by a description of the method.

Chapter 2