9419702 Kay ABSTRACT The long run objective of the project is to deepen our understanding of the relation between visual perception and linguistic meaning. More specifically, this study is conducted in the domain of words for colors. Words for colors have been and remain a key domain in which to study the relation between perception and language because colors themselves are objectively describable independent of the words used to name them in any particular language. For a study of this kind to be interpretable in general terms it is essential that data be gathered, not only from familiar languages of developed regions of Europe, America and Asia, but also from unwritten languages spoken by peoples at relatively simple technological levels in all parts of the world. Otherwise the findings may merely reflect aspects of technologically advanced societies, rather than revealing properties of homo sapiens. For this reason a survey of 111 unwritten languages, distributed world-wide, was conducted in a prior phase of this study. The meanings of the principal words for colors in each of these languages are established by obtaining from twenty-five (or occasionally fewer) speakers of each participating language that speaker's word for each of 320 colored stimuli, chosen to give a representative sample of all the colors visible to humans. Analysis of the stage of basic color term evolution of each language will be assessed. A set of detailed hypotheses regarding how the two original basic color terms, (white or red or yellow) and (black or green or blue), are eventually divided into the separate fundamental categories: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue will be investigated with regard to the full set of data on 111 languages. Separate hypotheses regarding derived categories such as purple, orange and brown and heterogeneous categories, such as 'desaturated'/'muddy-colored', will also be tested against the full data set. Ca tegories comprising both yellow and green are known to exist. They pose special problems for the psychophysical derivation of the evolutionary sequence of basic color terms; this problem will also be addressed. Special attention will be paid to color categories that appear in the data which are not related in a simple way to the psychophysically established basic color sensations. Special attention will also be paid to inter-speaker variation in each language set and its relation to the evolutionary status of the language community taken as a whole.
