Practice question · Numerical answer
What is the maximum number of basic colour terms Berlin and Kay found in any language?
Hints
- The range runs from two upward.
- Eleven, in languages with the fullest inventories.
Show the answer
11
Why
Eleven, with the smallest inventories having two, and the terms emerging in a near-fixed order, dark and light first, then red, then green and yellow, and so on. The near-universality of the ordering was what made the result matter: it argued against colour vocabulary being arbitrary.
Practise Origins, Evolution and Linguistic Relativity
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