Color Categories Are Not Arbitrary Color Categories Are Not Arbitrary

1. Challenges to the Universals and Evolution theory of basic color term naming A theory of basic color term meanings based on the observation of semantic universals and evolutionary regularity in the naming of colors across languages was proposed by Berlin and Kay (1969). This model has undergone numerous revisions. I will refer to the various versions collectively as the UE model. A constant feature of all versions of the UE model has been the observation that there are universal constraints on the naming of colors, that it is not the case, for example that " Our partitioning of the spectrum consists of the arbitrary imposition of a category system upon a continuous physical domain " (Krauss 1968: 268-269). Two recent studies have added important findings in the area of cross language color naming. Levinson's (2000) study of Yêlì Dnye 1 color naming has produced the first experimentally documented example of a language lacking a set of basic color terms that partitions the perceptual color space. These and related findings (e.g., Lyons 1995, 1999) have required revision of the UE model to take account of such Emergence Hypothesis (EH) phenomena (Kay 1999, Kay and Maffi 1999). 2 Roberson, Davies and Davidoff's (2000) study of Berinmo 3 color terms and related psychological tests (hereafter RDD) failed to replicate some important results of Rosch's Dani work (Heider 1972a,b, Heider and Olivier 1972), which had appeared 1 Yêlì Dnye is a language isolate spoken on Rossel Island in the Louisade Archipelago, Papua New Guinea. 2 Levinson's Yêlì Dnye results were widely available in preprint form before the published paper appeared. 3 Berinmo is the name given by Davidoff et al. for the language of "a remote, previously unstudied, hunter-gatherer tribe,... which lives on the upper reaches of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea" (Davidoff, Davies, and Roberson 1999: 203). No information is given by these authors regarding the genetic affiliation of this language, if any. To my knowledge, the name Berinmo did not appear in the literature prior to Davidoff et al. (1999).