Speakers of the same language generally agree whether two hues are different shades of the same color, in the sense that reddish orange and yellowish orange are both orange, or whether they are entirely different colors. And although speakers of different languages (especially pairs of languages whose speakers don’t interact) often disagree about what constitutes “the same color,” the disagreement isn’t as great as would be expected by chance. Statistical analysis of the World Color Survey’s data set—a collection of color categories in 110 languages from nonindustrial populations—found that the languages clustered together in color space to a greater degree than did sets of randomly generated categories. 1
Researchers have used several computational approaches to understand how languages’ color categories develop. Among them is the work of Andrea Baronchelli, a physicist at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, and his collaborators, who used a variant of the so-called...
