Their notion of “focus” was based on an intuition that we all share, namely that some shades are better or “more typical” examples of a given color than others. There may be millions of different shades of red, for instance, but we still feel that some of these are redder than others. If you were asked to choose the best example of red from the chart in figure 6, it is unlikely that you would choose a bordeaux color like H5 or a pale pinkish red like D1. While both of these are undoubtedly red, you would probably point at some shade in the area of G1 as a better example. Similarly, we feel that a grassy green in the region of F17 is greener than some other greens. Berlin and Kay thus defined the focus of each color as the particular shade that people feel is the best example of this color.
When they asked speakers of different languages to point at the best examples of various colors, there was surprising cross-cultural similarity in the choice of foci. The case of blue and green was particularly striking. There are many languages that don’t make a distinction between green and blue and treat these as shades of one color. One of them is Tzeltal, a Mayan language from Mexico that uses one term,
Since Berlin and Kay also found strong agreement about the foci of other colors among the informants from the twenty languages that they tested, they concluded that these foci were universal constants of the human race that are biologically determined and independent of culture. There is an inventory of exactly eleven natural foci, they claimed, that correspond exactly to the eleven basic colors of English: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray.
Berlin and Kay did not provide an actual explanation for the particular order in which the foci receive names. This, they said, was a matter for future research. But they did claim they knew where the explanation must be sought: in the nature of human vision. The only thing that culture was free to chose, they said, was how many of these foci receive separate names (and what labels to give them, of course). Once a culture has decided on a number, nature takes care of all the rest: it dictates which foci will receive names, it dictates in which order, and it draws the rough boundaries around these foci according to a predetermined design.
Like any pendulum worth its weight, received opinion finds it difficult to swing from one extreme position and settle directly in the middle, without first hurtling all the way to the opposite extreme. In the years following the 1969 revolution, lecture halls resounded with the new creed, and textbooks proclaimed-just as ardently as they had preached the diametrically opposed position in previous years-that color terms were natural and universal after all. Color was now hailed as the most striking example for the conceptual unity of mankind, and the language of color was declared as the trump argument in the wider nature versus culture debate, which was now being settled squarely in favor of nature.
Berlin and Kay’s book inspired many researchers to reexamine the concepts of color in many more languages, and in far greater detail and with greater accuracy than anything attempted before 1969. In the following decades, speakers’ intuitions about borders and foci in dozens of languages were systematically collected and compared. But as the number of languages grew from the twenty in Berlin and Kay’s original sample, and as the methods of elicitation became more sophisticated, it gradually emerged that the situation was less straightforward than Berlin and Kay had initially proposed. In fact, most of the categorical claims from 1969 about absolute universals in color naming had to be watered down in subsequent years.
To start with, it turned out that many languages contradict Berlin and Kay’s extensions to Geiger’s sequence, for they show that brown is not always the first color to receive a name after blue. What is more, later revisions had to abandon the claim that there are exactly eleven universal foci that correspond neatly to the English colors white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. In light of the new data, the alleged universal status of five of the foci-brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray-could no longer be defended, and the revised theory concentrated only on the six “major” foci: white, black, red, green, yellow, and blue. But even with these major colors, the foci turned out to be less uniform across languages than Berlin and Kay had initially assumed, as speakers’ choices in some languages strayed significantly from what were meant to be the universal foci. And finally, the larger database revealed languages that lump together under one concept combinations of foci that were deemed impossible in Berlin and Kay’s original model. There are languages, for instance, that have one color term that covers the light colors yellow, light green, and light blue. All in all, while some of the original rules formulated by Berlin and Kay still hold as strong tendencies among languages, hardly any of their claims remained intact as a universal law without exceptions.
After so much to-ing and fro-ing, from nature to culture and back and again, where has the debate ended up? The belief that color naming follows absolute natural laws has turned out to be wishful thinking, as there are exceptions to almost all the rules. And yet the similarities among languages in the choice of foci are still far too striking to be dismissed as haphazard: the great majority of languages still behave in a highly predictable way that would be hard to explain if cultures were free to divide the color concepts entirely at whim. This uneasy balance between conformity and divergence is particularly evident in the order in which color names evolve in different languages. On the one hand, the larger sample of languages reveals exceptions to almost all the predictions: the only rule that has remained truly without exceptions is that red is always the first color (after black and white) to receive a name. On the other hand, the great majority of languages conform to Geiger’s sequence or to the alternative of green before yellow, and this cannot be a mere coincidence.
So the data that have emerged over the past decades leave neither side in the debate-neither culture vultures nor nativist nerds-entirely satisfied. Or, rather, both sides are happy and in business, since they can continue arguing to their hearts’ content about whether color concepts are determined
In light of all the evidence, it seems to me that the balance of power between culture and nature can be characterized most aptly by a simple maxim: culture enjoys freedom within constraints. Culture has a considerable degree of freedom in dissecting the spectrum, but still within loose constraints laid down by nature. While the precise anatomical basis of these constraints is still far from understood, it is clear that nature hardly lays down inviolable laws for how the color space
The explanation for Geiger’s sequence should also be sought in a balance between natural constraints and cultural factors. There is undoubtedly something biologically special about our relation to red: like other Old World monkeys, humans seem to be designed to get excited by it. I once saw a sign in a zoo that warned people dressed in red not to venture too close to the cage of a gorilla. And experiments with humans have shown that exposure to red induces physiological effects such as increasing the electrical resistance of the skin, which is a measure of emotional arousal. There are sound evolutionary reasons for this, since red is a signal for many vital things, most importantly danger (blood) and sex (the female baboon’s big red bottom, for example, signals she is ready for breeding).
