Japanese Colour Nomenclature

Color domans: so what?

**For over 100 years, color nomenclature has been studied in order to find evidence of a linguistic relativity or universal structure in the way humans categorize their world.
**Developing a cross-cultural linguistic reference to patterned constraints could be used by some to suggest a theory of inherent human perception or not. **Developing a theory about how we organize our world is a big deal in the argument of 'nature vs. nurture' for anthropologists.

Color chaos

• Berlin & Kay, constraints on nomenclature systems
• 1-how they function
• 2-how they are used 
• 3-how they are developed 
• 4-how they change over time

Berlin & Kay
Test Process
1--320 colors on erasable acetate plates of varying hues & brightness, people marking all plates that are in a certain "range"
2--people also to choose one plate that would stand as the best example of a certain category

Berlin & Kay

trouble in paradise

Stanlaw's law

Since Berlin & Kay looked at color domains cross-culturally, they ignored the details found in languages such as Japanese and LOANWORDS

Stanlaw
"English loanwords are replacing native Japanese color terms
AND...
in reverse order to Berlin & Kay evolutionary sequence"

Stanlaw
"English loanwords are replacing native Japanese color terms
AND...
in reverse order to Berlin & Kay evolutionary sequence"

Differences in color domains in languages

• English, Yellow and Orange one category
• Zuni, Yellow and Orange same category
• Color categories in English vary greatly in size
• Red category in English was small, Green large
• Zuni categories were all about the same

Problems peeling the orange

RE-EXAMINATION
**Berlin & Kay re-examined color domains but with a different perspective
**Restriction and Operationalized

RESTRICTION
Examples that depend on the environment:
shirt color of the jaguar
birch white
chili pepper red

OPERATION
Operational definition of "abstract" terms that don't have a physical example like jaguars, birch trees, and chili peppers:

basic criteria for operational functions of color in a domain system

• term is monolexemic & unanalysable
• term is not included in any other range
• term not restricted to any single referent
• pyschological "salience" of term

Examples of basic criteria

• monolexic: red or blue but not reddish
• term not included in another: khaki (a kind of brown)
• term not restricted to single referent: blonde (only hair)
• "psychologically salient": sepia (not known outside art) 

STANLAW
argues against Berlin & Kay opinion that loanwords are "suspect"

berlin & kay findings

conclusions about re-examining color domain data

• all languages have at least 2, not more than 11 or 12 BASIC color terms
• basic color terms label "universal perceptual categories" (no more than 11)
• basic colors "historically" encoded in one of two orderings
• see page 215

universal stages

• Stage I: designation for light & dark
• Stage II: macro-white, macro-black, & macro-red
• Macro-white: white and light colors
• Macro-black: blacks, purples, dark colors
• Macro-red: reds, oranges, yellows, pinks

grue

Stages III and IV
compliment each other
Languages develop in one of two ways when growing color terminolgoy

At stage II, Macro-reds diverge to stage III into either Yellow or Grue

Why is this separation important?
Because per Berlin & Kay, the act of separating and categorizing color isn't arbitrary as suggested before.

"If we assume...there are only 11 basic color terms, there could be 2,048...possible... configurations"

"So, we could find languages that have a set of color terms: red, blue, pink, and grey; or black, brown, and purple; etc. But these are never found"

Also, Berlin & Kay found that "focal" paint chips had the greatest levels of recall and consistency across culture (Red, Blue, Yellow)

The danger that Sapir-Whorf and Boas were trying to avoid by upholding linguistic relativism was racism and "biological reductionism: people and their language are...due to their biology."

Noam Chomsky
peeled the grammar onion: all the world languages alike due to deep structure

Noam gave to us the reasoning that the infinite combinations of categorization all fall back to the same grammar rules in deep structure; thereby being a conditional state of language which does not rely upon relativism to exist

Noam's theories allowed a new notion of universalism to replace one of relativity without the dangers of ethnocentricism, racism, and support of post-colonial structures

But what about

Stanlaw argues "Japanese color lexicon consists of two sets of mutually exclusive terms; one native and one borrowed"

see page 218
Stanlaw argues Japanese accepting English loanwords to replace native origin words but in REVERSE order of Berlin & Kay

Stanlaw asked 91 people of various ages and genders, not just one, as Berlin & Kay did to identify salient terms of Japanese color

Discussion and instruction was also done in Japanese unless the consultant wanted to use English

97% of all polled thought shiro to be an important (salient) color in Japanese society

Defining BASIC color terms can be difficult. In Japanese, morphemes can be attached easily to nouns to make them a color term like -iro (colored) just like we do in English with -ish put at the end of color words like green and blue (blueish)

A second problem is how to consider what is a color term in Japanese; one character or two, or...? How do readings affect color terms? Example: ao-iro or sei-shoku; which would be considered blue? And by whom? And would this compromise the categorization?

"The traditional Berlin & Kay criteria of unanalysability, productivity, and morphological complexity may not be sufficient to determine a lexeme's basic color term status in Japanese"

Stanlaw did find the same salience of terms from Berlin & Kay (frequency of White & Black being stage I, see page 223)

"In places 9, 10, and 11 of table 9.4.. we should find (by B&K) momo-iro (pink), daidai-iro (orange), and nezumi-iro (grey) as the next color categories, in any order. Instead, in the next three ranks we find two English loanwords; pinku and orenji and the native Japanese color kon...the loanwords are in the place where the native terms should be"

Stanlaw goes on to illustrate the next five ranks are also in "contradiction" to the standard B&K model

1-"Why does the evolutionary sequence exist? 2-what are the mechanisms that cause a language and culture to move along the sequence?

Stanlaw suggests both questions are not easily answerable and still disputed but argues that the B&K model just needs to be expounded due the evidence he collected with the Japanese color terms

3 techniques that may "encourage" the development of color sequencing >>

...a language/culture could... 1-create new basic color categories 2-increase the number of terms available for basic color term status through extensive borrowing of loanwords 3-replace native terms with loanwords

Conclusion: "English loanword color term evidence shows" universalism as the main component of understanding the categorization of color and thought processes in a language/people and expresses culture physically and mentally within this paradigm set forth by B&K but modified by Stanlaw's research. Constraints are "complex" with layering of human "universals" and specific social and cultural modes that combine to create the domains