The Color Grey in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature

by KIRSTEN WOLF, University of Wisconsin, Madison

I

In their seminal work, Basic Color Terms, the linguist-anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay analyzed the color terms of close to one hundred of the world's languages, belonging to a variety of linguistic families and/or groups. They challenged the thesis of relativism in the encoding of color and advanced an alternative hypothesis, arguing that there was a universal inventory of eleven basic color terms, located in the color space where English speakers place the most typical examples of black, white, red, orange, yellow, brown, green, blue, purple, pink, and grey. Comparing the vocabularies of languages possessing fewer than these eleven categories, they demonstrated that basic color terms do not appear at random in the diachronic development of a language, but in an invariable seven-stage sequence illustrated below: