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Re:A Winelike Sea by throw0101b on Thursday April 27, 2023 @10:07PM (#35736773)
See also:

> Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969; ISBN 1-57586-162-3) is a book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. 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 either yellow or green.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms

And:

    > Berlin and Kay also found that, in languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern. This pattern is as follows:
    > 
    > All languages contain terms for black and white.
    > If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
    > If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
    > If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
    > If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
    > If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
    > If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange or gray.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term

Re:A Winelike Sea by TRiG_Ireland on Friday April 28, 2023 @06:13AM (#35739446)
Berlin & Kay were basically repeating research which had already been done decades before, but forgotten. Guy Deutscher's book _Through the Language Glass_ covers both the linguistics and the history of the research. It's a fascinating walk through the human brain and through the history of ideas. Highly recommended.
Re:A Winelike Sea by BariumBlue on Friday April 28, 2023 @06:57AM (#35739713)
I know Japanese used to have only one word for blue/green - "Midori".

According to this chart, does that mean that Japanese had five or less terms for different colors?

Re:A Winelike Sea by throw0101b on Friday April 28, 2023 @07:10AM (#35739818)
> I know Japanese used to have only one word for blue/green - "Midori".

All languages used to only have on word for blue/green, until they got a second worth splitting the two. Perhaps see §Japanese at:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...

Also:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_colors_of_Japan