particular case the hierarchy might actually be true must have made the embarrassment all the more painful. The temptation to forget about it was hard to resist, and as it turned out, an excuse for doing just that was not too difficult to come by. A suggestion was made that Geiger’s sequence may have been just a coincidence: the precedence of red over yellow, for instance, may just have been an accident of the sample of languages for which information happened to be available. Perhaps when a larger number of languages were examined, so the new argument ran, some would be found to have acquired a name for yellow before red. Not that anyone did find such languages, then or later (although one aspect of Geiger’s sequence did eventually require modification, as we shall see in a moment). But merely the hope that counterexamples might crop up one day was considered a good enough reason not to bother with explaining the inconvenient parallels in the development of color vocabulary among so many unrelated languages. Geiger was thus thrown out with the dirty bathwater of nineteenth-century bigotry.
In the decades following the First World War, Geiger’s sequence was simply erased from memory, as was the whole protracted debate of the nineteenth century. All that now remained was one mantra: color vocabularies vary greatly between cultures. The deep similarities that underlie those differences no longer seemed to be worth a mention, and each culture was now claimed to carve up the spectrum entirely according to its whim. In 1933, the leading American linguist of the generation, Leonard Bloomfield, stated the now established creed with confidence: “Physicists view the color-spectrum as a continuous scale, but languages mark off different parts of this scale quite arbitrarily.” The equally eminent Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev echoed Bloomfield a decade later, asserting that each language “arbitrarily sets its boundaries” on the spectrum. By the 1950s, the formulations became even more extreme. The American anthropologist Verne Ray declared in 1953 that “there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ division of the spectrum. The color systems of man are not based upon psychological, physiological, or anatomical factors. Each culture has taken the spectral continuum and has divided it upon a basis which is quite arbitrary.”
How could such piffle be spouted by sober scientists? Just imagine what these statements would actually mean if they were true. Suppose the color concepts of each language were really arbitrary and there was nothing natural about them at all. We could then expect that any random way of carving up the spectrum would have the same likelihood of being adopted by languages around the world. But is this the case? Let’s take a simple example. English has three color concepts, “yellow,” “green,” “blue,” that divide the relevant part of the color space roughly as shown in figure 4a.
Now, if that division were merely arbitrary, we would expect it to be no more common among the world’s languages than, say, the division into: “grellow” (green + yellow), “turquoise,” and “sapphire,” roughly as in figure 4b.
So why are there dozens of languages that do things roughly like English, and none reported with the alternative division?
If this example sounds too Anglocentric, consider a more exotic one. We have already seen that there are languages that divide the whole color space into just three concepts. If colors really were arbitrary, then one would expect that any three-way partition of the color space would be just as likely to be adopted by languages around the globe. In particular, we would expect the following two options to be found with roughly equal frequency. The first option (figure 5a) is represented by the language of Bellona, the Polynesian atoll that I mentioned earlier. The three concepts of Bellonese divide the color space as follows: “white,” which includes also all very bright colors; “black,” which also includes purple, blue, brown, and green; and “red,” which also includes orange, pink, and dark yellow. The second option (figure 5b) is said to be found in another island language with which we are also familiar. In Ziftish, the division differs from Bellonese in one important detail: green belongs with “red” rather than with “black.” In other words, the “red” concept in Ziftish includes red, orange, pink, dark yellow, and green, whereas the “black” concept includes just black, purple, blue, and brown. Now, if each culture really set the boundaries between colors “quite arbitrarily,” then we would expect the Ziftish way to be just as common as the Bellonese. So why is it that there are dozens of languages that behave like Bellonese but not a single one is known to behave like the proverbial Ziftish?
For decades such facts were considered beneath the notice of serious scholars, and the claims about the arbitrary concepts of color were promulgated unchallenged in textbooks and lecture halls. The theory of arbitrariness may have had no legs to stand on, nor bottom, nor back. But as with the chair in the ditty, the theory just sat, ignoring little things like that.
All that changed in 1969, when a little book by two researchers from Berkeley, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, rudely interrupted half a century of blissful oblivion and reinvented the spectrum. Having sensed the absurdity of the claims about arbitrariness in color vocabulary, Berlin and Kay set out to do some systematic comparisons: they collected judgments about color names from informants in twenty different languages, using an array of colored chips as in figure 6.
Their analysis led them to two startling discoveries, and as the news of these discoveries began to spread, their book was heralded as a new dawn in the study of language, a revolutionary breakthrough, a watershed that would transform both linguistics and anthropology. One reviewer wrote: “It seems no exaggeration to claim for Berlin and Kay’s
What were those two amazing findings? First, Berlin and Kay discovered that color terms were not so arbitrary after all. Although there are considerable variations between the color systems of different languages, some ways of dividing the spectrum are still far more natural than others: some are adopted by many unrelated languages while others are not adopted by any.
It was their second discovery, however, that left the academic community reeling. This was the revelation, which Berlin and Kay themselves termed a “totally unexpected finding,” that languages acquire the names for colors in a predictable order. To be more precise, Berlin and Kay discovered the sequence that Lazarus Geiger had postulated 101 years before and that in Magnus’s hands turned into the subject of intense and protracted debate in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Admittedly, Berlin and Kay’s evolutionary sequence differed from their predecessors’ in a few details. First, they refined Geiger’s prediction about yellow and green. Geiger thought that yellow always receives a name before green, but Berlin and Kay’s data revealed that some languages actually develop a name for green before yellow. So they added an alternative sequence and allowed for two different paths of evolution:
black and white › red › yellow › green › blue › black and white › red › green › yellow › blue
On the other hand, Berlin and Kay also attempted to make a few additions to Geiger’s sequence that eventually turned out not to have been improvements. They believed, for instance, that the universal sequence can be extended to other colors and claimed that brown is the color that always receives a separate name after blue and that either pink, purple, orange, or gray is always the color that comes after brown.
Notwithstanding such cosmetic differences, Berlin and Kay rediscovered Geiger’s 101-year-old sleeping beauty essentially unchanged and woke it up with a smacking great kiss. Of course, no one dreamed of calling it Geiger’s sequence anymore, as Geiger’s claims on it had been erased from the collective consciousness. Instead, the progression is now universally known as “Berlin and Kay, 1969.” But matters of copyright aside, the sequence that had dogged the debate in the nineteenth century suddenly trotted back on stage and demanded explanation: why do so many languages acquire color words in the same order, and why-underlying the variation-is there still so much similarity between the color concepts of different languages?
Berlin and Kay’s response to these questions swung the pendulum all the way back to nature. After half a century in which culture not only enjoyed the fruits of its rightful victory but was hailed as an absolute monarch with unlimited powers, Berlin and Kay went almost all the way back to Gladstone’s original belief that “our own primary colours have been given to us by Nature.” They did not deny, of course, that cultures can vary in how they set the boundaries between colors. But they argued that underlying the superficial divergence in boundaries, there is a far deeper communality, indeed universality, that was revealed in what they called the “foci” of the different colors.
