Abstract
Languages differ markedly in the number of colour terms in their lexicons. The Himba, for example, a remote culture in Namibia, were reported in 2005 to have only a 5-colour term language. We re-examined their colour naming using a novel computer-based method drawing colours from across the gamut rather than only from the saturated shell of colour space that is the norm in cross-cultural colour research. Measuring confidence in communication, the Himba now have seven terms, or more properly categories, that are independent of other colour terms. Thus, we report the first augmentation of major terms, namely green and brown, to a colour lexicon in any language. A critical examination of supervised and unsupervised machine-learning approaches across the two datasets collected at different periods shows that perceptual mechanisms can, at most, only to some extent explain colour category formation and that cultural factors, such as linguistic similarity are the critical driving force for augmenting colour terms and effective colour communication.
Highlights
Languages differ markedly in the number of colour terms in their lexicons
The overlap on the surface colours against the sampling of the World Color Survey is 91% due to the limits of the sRGB gamut but we have shown in earlier studies (Mylonas and MacDonald, 2010) and in Table S1 that we can estimate the distribution of basic colour terms in English with 100% accuracy on the surface of the Munsell solid
Unique responses (0.8%) from single observers were excluded because we could not be confident that other observers would understand the samples of the computerised experiment, a large increase over the 9 colour terms (5 frequent and 4 infrequent) that were reported in our previous study for naming the 160 fully saturated samples of the physical Munsell Book of Color (Roberson et al, 2005) and the 10 colour terms elicited in a list task (Grandison et al, 2014)
Summary
Languages differ markedly in the number of colour terms in their lexicons. The languages of some remote populations are reported to have no or as few as two colour terms whereas most European languages have many more; at least 11 according to most definitions of a colour term (Berlin and Kay, 1969/1991; Wierzbicka, 2015). There have been few, if any, studies with remote populations that have used computerised colour presentations to overcome these problems, perhaps because of worries about uncontrolled colour reproduction and the unfamiliarity of computer screens to indigenous populations. The latter objection has been shown to be of no concern for the Himba (Biederman et al, 2009; Linnell et al, 2018) and the former is overcome (Mylonas et al, 2019; Paggetti et al, 2016). We may find colour terms that could not have been found in ours and all other previous cross-cultural research
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