Colour terms in Russian: reflections of typological constraints in a single language

Abstract

One of the milestones in typological studies is Berlin & Kay's (1969) account of basic colour terms, which has produced a steady stream of research of various types. Berlin & Kay summarized their work as follows.In sum, our two major findings indicate that the referents for the basic color terms of all languages appear to be drawn from a set of eleven universal perceptual categories, and these categories become encoded in the history of a given language in a partially fixed order (1969: 4–5).