Draining the language out of color.

Abstract

Perhaps to some extent, allows Paul Kay, 69, emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. Yet he and his former colleague, Brent Berlin (now at the University of Georgia), have been at the center of a 35-year running debate concerning Whorf's hypothesis, called linguistic relativity. Berlin, a linguistic anthropologist reared in Oklahoma, had been researching a Mayan language of southern Mexico. Back in the 1960s a model of color vision propounded by the late Russell L. De Valois, a Berkeley psychologist, had been interpreted as establishing that the categories red, yellow, green and blue were hardwired into the brain.