Colour Terminology and Colour Terms

Lecture by Kirsten Wolf.

Abstract

This paper briefly surveys scholarship on colour terminology with particular attention to Brent Berlin and Paul Kay’s seminal study Basic Color Terms (1969) and later revisions by the two scholars and others to the proposed evolutionary sequence of basic colour terms. Following this, the evolutionary sequence is applied to Old Norse-Icelandic and concludes with some comments on colour terms in the modern Scandinavian languages.