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Everything about Basic Color Terms
Linguistics book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay
Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution 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. Wikipedia →
🧭 Start here: a 6-step reading path
- Read the overview: Basic Color TermsA 5-minute orientation
- Skim a recent paper: A comparison of basic color terms in Mandarin and SpanishInfluential work since 2022
- Pick up a classic book: BibleThe most-reprinted book on the subject
- Read the landmark paper: The Linguistic Significance of the Meanings of Basic Color TermsCited 487 times
- Go sideways: Linguistic relativity and the color naming debateA closely related topic
- Go sideways: Color termA closely related topic
📖 Definitions
No dictionary entry for this exact phrase.
🗂️ The subject at a glance
No outline available.
🏆 Landmark papers (most cited)
The Linguistic Significance of the Meanings of Basic Color Terms
Yélî Dnye and the Theory of Basic Color Terms
Salience of chromatic basic color terms confirmed by three measures
Synchronic variability and diachronic change in basic color terms
Singing the Russian Blues: An Argument for Culturally Basic Color Terms
The basic color terms of Russian
Revisiting Basic Color Terms
Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Brent Berlin , Paul Kay
🆕 Influential since 2022
A comparison of basic color terms in Mandarin and Spanish
Basic color terms in Thai
The Focus and Boundary of Mandarin Chinese Basic Color Terms: An Empirical Study
Collocations of Basic Color Terms and Emotion Terms in S panish Versus C hinese
Basic color terms of the Yakut language in comparison with Mongolian and Russian: a corpus analysis of collocations
📚 Books worth reading
BibleBible · 1200
Robinson CrusoeDaniel Defoe · 1686
PsychologyRobert A. Baron · 1977
Discrete Mathematics and Its ApplicationsKenneth H. Rosen · 1988
Wig making and stylingMartha Ruskai · 2010
Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScriptRobin Nixon · 2009
The fireside cook bookJames Beard, Alice Provensen · 1949
A treasury of knitting patternsBarbara G. Walker · 1968
Ranked by number of editions on Open Library, a rough measure of how lasting a book is.
🔗 Related topics
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