Research on Colour Words

According to Berlin and Kay (1969) 'Basic Color Terms, their Universality and
Evolution'
There are 11 basic colour terms in English:

red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, grey, black and white.
Languages evolved from having only 2 basic colour terms, and gradually added
more over time until they reached a maximum of 11 basic terms.
Berlin and Kay's work proposed that the basic color terms in a culture, such as black, brown or red,
are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has. (All cultures have terms for black/dark
and white/bright. If a culture has three color terms the third is red. If a culture has four it has yellow
or green...)
Berlin and Kay posit seven levels in which cultures fall, with Stage I languages having only the
colors black (darkcool) and white (lightwarm). Languages in Stage VII have eight or more basic
color terms. This includes English, which has eleven basic color terms. The authors theorize that as
languages evolve, they acquire new basic color terms in a strict chronological sequence; if a basic
color term is found in a language, then the colors of all earlier stages should also be present. The
sequence is as follows:
Stage I: Dark-cool and light-warm (this covers a larger set of colors than English "black" and
"white".)
Stage II: Red
Stage III: Either green or yellow
Stage IV: Both green and yellow
Stage V: Blue
Stage VI: Brown
Stage VII: Purple, pink, orange, or gray

Current doctrine in linguistics and anthropology holds that each language and
culture expresses a unique world view by its particular way of slicing up reality into
named categories. (See Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).
This says that it is difficult to make exact translations between languages because
hearers see the world in a way governed by their own language.
Colour vocabulary is a possible example of this.
According to accepted doctrine, basic colour words are not translatable across
languages.

21 languages:

2 Amerindian 16 African 1 Pacific 1 Australian

Aboriginal 1 South India

WHITE BLACK RED GREEN

Stage IIIa

8 languages:

6 African 1 Philippine 1 New Guinea

WHITE BLACK RED YELLOW

Stage IlIb

9 languages:

2 Australian Aboriginal 1 Philippine 3

Polynesian 1 Greek (Homeric) 2 African

WHITE BLACK RED GREEN YELLOW

Stage IV

18 languages:

12 Amerindian 1 Sumatra 4 African 1 Eskimo

WHITE BLACK RED GREEN YELLOW BL Stage V

UE
8 languages:

5 African 1 Chinese 1 Philippine 1 South India

WHITE BLACK RED GREEN YELLOW BL Stage VI

UEBROWN
5 languages:

2 African 1 Sumatra 1 South India 1

Amerindian

COMPLETE ARRAY OF COLOURS

Stage VII

20 languages:

1 Arabic 2 Malayan 6 European 1 Chinese 1

Indian 2 African 1 Hebrew 1 Japanese 1
Korean 2 South East Asian 1 Amerindian 1
Philippine

However Berlin and Kaye's work has been criticised, for example in "Revisiting Basic
Color Terms" by Barbara Saunders who claims that Berlin and Kaye's work is
fundamentally flawed.
In one of her less wordy paragraphs Saunders says:
"Though Berlin and Kay insist their tests were 'empirical', it is worth looking at
them more closely. There were labelling, transcription and factual errors,
empirical deficiencies in the experiments, a language sample that was not
random, and a bilingual and colonial factor that was ignored. The informants
were narrowly homogenous, often with one bilingual speaker for each of
nineteen language, all foreign students, presumably at Berkeley (Rosch
1972).26. Finally, fifteen of the twenty mapped languages were at
Evolutionary Stage Seven, meaning that B&K's hardest datum - the universal
clustering of foci - was a foregone conclusion."

A correspondent to this author says:

It's also worth noting that the phrase "complete range of colours" is meaningless
unless precisely defined. Colour identification is partly physiological (most humans
can naturally "see" the full spectrum) and partly cultural / linguistic (individual