dChan
Anonymous ID: 84b07e June 28, 2020, 1:50 a.m. No.9774125   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Figure 1: Berlin and Kay's (1969) Paradigm for the Order in which Colors are Learned

white\ /green \ | purple

>>red >>blue>brown→| pink

black/ \yellow/ | orange

| gray

Or, as Brown describes it:

 

[i]f a language has only two colorsand all languages have at least twothey are always white and black; if a language has three colors, the one added is red; if a fourth is added, it will be either green or yellow; when a fifth is added, it will then include both green and yellow; the sixth added is blue; the seventh added is brown; and if an eighth or more terms are added, it or they will be purple, pink, orange, or gray (Brown 1991: 13-14).

A "normal" plot for colored letters, following along Berlin and Kay's (1969) paradigm of eleven colors, would flow between two interacting patterns. First, if all eleven colors are available to be chosen from, distribution should be even between them, with each color accounting for 9% of the total. This, however, would work against a second factor, which Berlin and Kay pointed out, whereby certain colors in the paradigm are more likely to be filled in before others, in the order of black/white first, then red, green/yellow, blue, brown, and gray/orange/pink/purple. Thus, there should be somewhat heavier weighting towards the black/white end of the ordering, and one would expect fewer than 9% for the gray/orange/pink/purple end.