Descartes’ and Locke’s accounts of sense-making tend to neglect the fact that experience and mind are cultural and historical. In other words, they are variable according to human contexts of meaning, where contexts of meaning – history – are the consequences of human practice, and cultures can be vastly different. In their trail, modern philosophy, psychology, and today neuroscience often neglect culture and history, too.¹⁷⁰ However, differences in historical experience and cultural mindedness are as important to our account of human sense-making as biophysical universals.

Color is a favorite topic among socio-historical linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers of mind alike. Often, the archetype in color analysis is the mind and body of the singular person. However, the sensible world is a place where colors are a creation of human artifice as much as they are facts of nature. Notwithstanding certain continuities in nature, including the nature of the human body, the praxis of color varies considerably. The electromagnetic spectrum and the range of human color perception may be what it is^§MS1.3.1c but human references to color and the uses to which color reference is put are widely varied.

In the sociolinguistics of color, perhaps the most celebrated work is by Berlin and Kay, the title of whose book announces their unequivocal conclusion, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Universality: in their study of ninety-eight languages, respondents were asked to name color chips, then locate them in a Munsell Chart.^§MS1.3.1g They found that there are only eleven basic color categories: white, black, red, yellow, blue, green, purple, pink, orange, brown, and gray. Evolution: some languages have words for more of these basic color categories than others, and these can be placed in an evolutionary sequence, from what Berlin and Kay term “primitive” to “advanced.”

Some languages only have two of the basic color terms, black and white: Dugum Dani in New Guinea; Ngombe in Congo; Paliyan in India. In evolutionary terms, Berlin and Kay call these Stage 1 languages. Stage 2 languages add a third term, red, to their color classification repertoire: Swahili in Tanzania, Poto in the United States, and Toda in South India. Stage 3 languages add green or yellow. And so on through seven stages where languages become “more evolved” by adding more basic color terms, culminating at between eight and eleven color terms in English, Spanish, and Arabic. Their conclusion? “There seems to be a positive correlation between general cultural complexity (and/or level of technological development) and complexity of color vocabulary.”¹⁷¹

Screaming to escape their conclusions is the evidence Berlin and Kay themselves provide. We ask: how could such extraordinary variety in so fundamental a quality as color be taken to indicate universality? As for evolution, why would we consider us moderns to be more evolved, because when it comes to our unusually obsessive rendering of color to walls or pages or digital screens, eleven terms is nowhere near enough? On the other hand, isn’t it sufficient to say that everyone in every language has as wide a range of color terms as circumstances may require? In Berlin and Kay’s own words, “every language has an indefinitely large number of expressions that denote the sensation of color.” In this context, what does “basic” color term mean? Their answer is, a term that means what it does on a stand-alone basis (such as “red”) as opposed to metaphorical extension (“gold”) or a term extended by qualification (“light green”). However, if every color is expressible in every language, why would it matter whether they are expressed with a unique term rather an analogical one? Russian, meanwhile, seems to have two “basic” terms for blue, and what is the significance of that when in English we can with equal facility say “light blue” and “dark blue.”¹⁷² Does this make Russian more “evolved” when it comes to blue?

What, then, are the reasons for the differences? Perhaps it’s not that we users of modern written languages speak in ways that are more evolved; it is just that our ways of making sense – our grammars of meaning – differ for reasons of our histories and purposes. On the one hand the cultures of first peoples may simply have not much use for some of the color terms we moderns use – and in the same way modern cultures have abandoned the labyrinthine grammar of kinship used by many first peoples^§AS1.1.3c because, at least to this degree of intricacy, kinship no longer suits our purposes.

Then, even in languages which seem a lot less “evolved” in terms of their number of “basic” terms, when needs arise, people do a lot of color work. Quechua speakers in Peru can name 350 varieties of potato, largely distinguished by terms identifying the color of the skin or pulp of the potato, or the flowers of the potato plant.¹⁷³ In their Philippine jungle context, Hanunóo color categories distinguish levels of succulence across a scale of wetness and dryness.¹⁷⁴

Some languages don’t even have a word for color.¹⁷⁵ There is no word for “color” in the language Yélî Dnye of Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea, and only three words that Berlin and Kay would classify as “basic color terms.” This is in part because, as the linguist Stephen Levinson concludes, “color is simply of minor communication import, handled by a range of descriptive phrases,” though these, he shows, are numerous and reflect subtle color variations.¹⁷⁶

“We Don’t Talk Much about Color Here,” said the Bellonese speaker on the Polynesian island of Bellona, mystified by the linguist’s questioning. Although with no word for color and only at Stage 2 on the Berlin and Kay evolutionary ladder, when contextually located color terms are taken into consideration, the Bellonese “could also be considered to have an extremely sophisticated system of color notation, with innumerable ‘color words,’ way beyond the Western system, and thus much more sophisticated.”¹⁷⁷

The point, then, is not the universality of color naming, but the extraordinary differences in such naming, across human cultures and in human history. Nor are the differences a matter of evolution. Modern color terminology is not more evolved. Color terminologies are just differently framed, for different purposes.

And if there are just eleven terms in the most advanced languages, these are inadequate to the ends of modernity. Not only do they have to be extended in modern naming schemes. In the digital era, words are extended and in many places replaced by transpositions into the properties of quantity – alphanumeric naming.^§MS1.1.1c These differences and changes are the stuff of history, and given the pain and uncertainty of modernity, there is no claiming that “our” history might be in evolutionary terms ahead of “theirs.” Modernity may be temporally later than the sense-making grammars of first peoples,^§MS2.1.2d and it may have displaced them via colonialism and other atrocities. But it is by no means smarter.

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¹⁷⁰ James Paul Gee, 1992 [2013], The Social Mind: Language, Ideology, and Social Practice, Champaign, IL: Common Ground.

¹⁷¹ Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, 1969, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 2–3, 46–62, 16.

¹⁷² A.E. Moss, 1989, “Basic Colour Terms: Problems and Hypotheses,” Lingua 78:313–20; A.E. Moss,

I. Davies, G. Corbett, and G. Laws, 1990, “Mapping Russian Basic Colour Terms Using Behavioural Measures,” Lingua 82:313–32.

¹⁷³ Ralph Bolton, 1978, “Black, White, and Red All Over: The Riddle of Color Term Salience,” Ethnology 17(3):287–311, pp. 297–98.

¹⁷⁴ Harold C. Conklin, 1955, “Hanunóo Color Categories,” Southwest Journal of Anthropology

11:339–44.

¹⁷⁵ Anna Wierzbicka, 2006, “The Semantics of Color: A New Paradigm,” pp. 1–24 in Progress in Colour Studies, Volume 1: Language and Culture, edited by C.P. Biggam and C.J. Kay, Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins.

¹⁷⁶ Stephen C. Levinson, 2000, “Yélî Dnye and the Theory of Basic Color Terms,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10(1):1–53, p. 41.

¹⁷⁷ Rolf Kuschel, and Torben Monberg, 1974. “‘We Don’t Talk Much About Colour Here’: A Study of Colour Semantics on Bellona Island,” Man 9(2):213–42, p. 241.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 141-143. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Berlin and Kay’s "Basic Color Terms" §MS1.3.1a