gems, color science

Over the past thirty years, various revisions of the Berlin and Kay (1969) model of the evolution of basic color term systems have been developed, driven by both empirical findings and theoretical advances. Empirically, ongoing discoveries about color naming systems have necessitated updates to the descriptive model. Theoretically, researchers have increasingly drawn on insights from vision science to explain the synchronic and diachronic constraints that shape color terminology. This paper contributes to both lines of inquiry by addressing a new empirical question using data from the World Color Survey (WCS) and proposing a revised model that not only responds to recent empirical challenges but also offers fresh theoretical motivation from the study of color vision for the constraints observed in color naming systems.