Tuesday, April 06, 2004

Draining the Language out of Color: "Kay and Berlin hit on color terminology in the early 1960s while comparing notes on their field research. Kay, a New York City-born, New Orleans-bred cultural anthropologist, had just returned from 15 months in Tahiti. Berlin, a linguistic anthropologist reared in Oklahoma, had been researching a Mayan language of southern Mexico. 'We found that in both our languages, all the major color terms but one were exactly like those in English, and in the one area of difference, they differed in exactly the same way.' (They grouped green and blue to form what Kay and Berlin called 'grue.') That two such profoundly unrelated languages should name colors alike seemed to point to some universal linguistic pattern. "