WHY ARE BASIC COLOR NAMES "BASIC"?

Animesh Mukherjee (), Vittorio Loreto () and Francesca Tria ()
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Animesh Mukherjee: Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI), Viale Settimio Severo 65, 10133 Torino, Italy
Vittorio Loreto: Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza Università di Roma, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy
Francesca Tria: Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI), Viale Settimio Severo 65, 10133 Torino, Italy

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2012, vol. 15, issue 03, pages 1150016-1-1150016-13

Abstract: It is widely known that color names across the world's languages tend to be organized into a neat hierarchy with a small set of "basic names" featuring in a comparatively fixed order across linguistic societies. However, to date, the basic names have only been defined through a set of linguistic principles. There is no statistical definition that quantitatively separates the basic names from the rest of the color words across languages. Here we present a rigorous statistical analysis of the World Color Survey database hosting color word information from 110 non-industrialized languages. The central result is that those names for which a population of individuals show a larger overall agreement across languages turn out to be the basic ones exactly reproducing the color name hierarchy and, thereby, providing, for the first time, an empirical definition of the basic color names.

Keywords: Computational cognitive science; world color survey; basic color names; statistical physics; term agreement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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