Augmenting a colour lexicon

Mylonas, Dimitris, Caparos, Serge and Davidoff, Jules (2022) Augmenting a colour lexicon. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 9 (1). ISSN 2662-9992

Abstract

Languages differ markedly in the number of colour terms in their lexicons. The Himba, for example, a remote culture in Namibia, were reported in 2005 to have only a 5-colour term language. We re-examined their colour naming using a novel computer-based method drawing colours from across the gamut rather than only from the saturated shell of colour space that is the norm in cross-cultural colour research. Measuring confidence in communication, the Himba now have seven terms, or more properly categories, that are independent of other colour terms. Thus, we report the first augmentation of major terms, namely green and brown, to a colour lexicon in any language. A critical examination of supervised and unsupervised machine-learning approaches across the two datasets collected at different periods shows that perceptual mechanisms can, at most, only to some extent explain colour category formation and that cultural factors, such as linguistic similarity are the critical driving force for augmenting colour terms and effective colour communication.

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Official URL:	https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01045-3
Item Type:	Article
Disciplines:	Computing, Maths, Engineering and Natural Sciences > Computer Science Computing, Maths, Engineering and Natural Sciences > Data Science & AI
Depositing User:	Dimitris Mylonas
Date Deposited:	05 Oct 2023 12:58
Last Modified:	24 Oct 2023 10:16
URI:	https://nul.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/319

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• Augmenting a colour lexicon. (deposited 27 Jul 2023 09:53)
  • Augmenting a colour lexicon. (deposited 05 Oct 2023 12:58) [Currently Displayed]

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