Cover not available
Article published In:
Diachronica
Vol. 40:4 (2023) ► pp.492–531

Linguistic mechanisms of colour term evolution

A diachronic investigation of “Russian browns” buryj and koričnevyj

ORCID logo | Kazan Federal University
ORCID logo | Kazan Federal University
ORCID logo | Kazan Federal University
ORCID logo | Higher School of Economics University
ORCID logo | Liverpool Hope University
We investigated diachrony of distributional semantics of two competing Russian colour terms (CTs) for ‘brown’, buryj (11th century) and koričnevyj (17th century), using the Russian subcorpus of Google Books Ngram (2020). Time-series analysis (1800–2019) of bigrams gauged each term’s frequencies of occurrence and changes in combinability with nouns for natural objects, artefacts, abstract concepts and figurative expressions. In frequency, koričnevyj overtook buryj in the 1920s, confirming its basic status in modern Russian. The perplexity index indicates that koričnevyj steadily increased the range of denoted objects, with artefacts being front runners in the buryj-to-koričnevyj transition. The results corroborate Rakhilina’s (2007a, 2007b, 2008) hypothesis that an incipient CT initially collocates with nouns denoting artefacts but gradually expands to the realm of natural objects supplanting an old CT. Moreover, koričnevyj and buryj are discerned by denotations and connotations. The present findings provide insights into general mechanisms of the linguistic evolution of an emergent basic CT.
Keywords: “Russian browns”, computational linguistics, Google Books Ngram, colour term collocational dynamics, diachronic distributional analysis, linguistic colour term evolution
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The Berlin-Kay hypothesis of basic colour categories
    • 1.2Evolution of basic colour categories as partitioning of colour space: Explanatory schemes and mechanisms
    • 1.3Evolution from a “proto-archaic” to a new hue-based basic colour category and term
    • 1.4Evolution of basic colour terms: A linguistic approach
    • 1.5Corpus analysis of the linguistic behaviour of colour terms
    • 1.6“Russian browns”: Etymology, history of emergence and linguistic behaviour
    • 1.7Hypothesis and aims of the present study
  • 2.Materials and Methods
    • 2.1Data source: Russian subcorpus of Google Books Ngram
    • 2.2Data cleansing and lemmatisation
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Dynamics of the occurrences of buryj and koričnevyj
    • 3.2Derivational morphology of buryj and koričnevyj
    • 3.3Frequency distribution of “Russian browns” in diachrony
    • 3.4Competition of the two Russian ‘brown’ terms
    • 3.5Nouns of object classes in bigrams: A diachronic analysis
    • 3.6Analysis of atypical contexts where koričnevyj collocates with nouns for natural objects
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Summary of the major findings
    • 4.2Denotata of koričnevyj and buryj
    • 4.3Connotative meanings of koričnevyj and buryj
    • 4.4The koričnevyj term as a socio-cultural marker
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Supplementary materials
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 27 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.22013.boc
References (90)
References
Bakhilina, Natalia B. 1975. Istorija cvetooboznačenij v russkom jazyke [History of colour terms in Russian]. Moscow: Nauka (in Russian).Google Scholar
Berlin, Brent and Paul Kay. 1969/1991. Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Biggam, Carole P. 2006. Political upheaval and disturbance in the colour vocabulary of Early English. In Carole P. Biggam and Christian Kay (eds.), Progress in colour studies. Vol. I. Language and culture, 159–179. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012. The semantics of colour: A historical approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bocharov, Victor V., Svetlana V. Alexeeva, Dmitry V. Granovsky, Ekaterina V. Protopopova et al. 2013. Crowdsourcing morphological annotation. Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies 131. 109–114. [URL]
Bochkarev, Vladimir V., Anna V. Shevlyakova, Galina V. Paramei, and Ekaterina V. Rakhilina. 2021. A quantitative study of Russian colour terms buryj and koričnevyj in the Google Books Ngram corpus. Linguistic Forum 2020: Language and Artificial Intelligence, Moscow 12–14 November 2020. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 2852. [URL]
Brown, Peter F., Stephen A. Della Pietra, Vincent J. Della Pietra, Jennifer C. Lai, and Robert L. Mercer. 1992. An estimate of an upper bound for the entropy of English. Computational Linguistics 18(1). 31–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chaabouni, Rahma, Eugene Kharitonov, Emmanuel Dupoux, and Marco Baroni. 2021. Communicating artificial neural networks develop efficient color-naming systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. 118(12). e2016569118. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Conway, Bevil R., Sivalogeswaran Ratnasingam, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Richard Futrell, and Edward Gibson. 2020. Communication efficiency of color naming across languages provides a new framework for the evolution of color terms. Cognition 1951. 104086. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corbett, Greville G. and Ian R. L. Davies. 1995. Linguistics and behavioural measures for ranking basic colour terms. Studies in Language 19(2). 301–357. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corbett, Greville G. and Gerry Morgan. 1988. Colour terms in Russian: Reflections of typological constraints in a single language. Journal of Linguistics 24(1). 31–64. [URL]. DOI logo
Dal, Vladimir. 1863–1866. Tolkovyj slovat’ živogo velikorusskogo jazyka [Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language]. St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences (in Russian).Google Scholar
Davies, Ian R. L. and Greville G. Corbett. 1994. The basic color terms of Russian. Linguistics 32(1). 65–89. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Decock, Lieven. 2021. Conceptual change and conceptual engineering: the case of colour concepts. Inquiry 64(1–2). 168–185. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Falla, Paul S. 1984. The Oxford English–Russian dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Forbes, Isabel. 1979. The terms brun and marron in modern standard French. Journal of Linguistics 15(2). 295–305. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2006. Age-related differences in the basic colour vocabulary of French. In Carole P. Biggam and Christian J. Kay (eds.), Progress in colour studies. Vol. I: Language and culture, 101–109. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frumkina, Rebecca M. 1984. Cvet, smysl, sxodstvo. Aspekty psixolingvističeskogo analiza [Colour, meaning, and similarity: Aspects of a psycholinguistic analysis]. Moscow: Nauka (in Russian).Google Scholar
Frumkina, Rebecca M. and Alexei V. Mikhejev. 1996. Meaning and categorization. New York: Nova Science.Google Scholar
Gage, John. 1999. What meaning had colour in early societies? Cambridge Archaeological Journal 91. 109–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibbons, Jean D. and Subhabrata Chakraborti. 2010. Nonparametric statistical inference. 5th ed. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis/CRC Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gippius, Alexei A. 2020. Berestjanye gramoty iz raskopok 2019 g. v Velikom Novgorode i Staroj Russe [Birchbark letters from Veliky Novgorod and Staraya Russa excavations of 2019]. Voprosy Jazykoznanija, Iss. 5, 22–37 (in Russian). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Google Books Ngram. 2020. [URL]
Greenfeld, Philip J. 1986. What is grey, brown, pink, and sometimes purple: The range of “wild-card” color terms. American Anthropologist 88(4). 908–916. [URL]. DOI logo
Gulordava, Kristina and Marco Baroni. 2011. A distributional similarity approach to the detection of semantic change in the Google Books Ngram corpus. In Proceedings of the GEMS 2011 Workshop on Geometrical Models of Natural Language Semantics. 67–71. [URL]
Haynie, Hannah J. and Claire Bowern. 2016. Phylogenetic approach to the evolution of color term systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the U.S.A. 113(48). 13666–13671. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heaps, Harold S. 1978. Information retrieval: Computational and theoretical aspects, 206–208. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Herne, Gunnar. 1954. Die Slavischen Farbenbenennungen. Eine semasiologisch-etymologische Untersuchung. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells.Google Scholar
Hill, Peter M. 1972. Die Farbwörter der russischen und bulgarischen Schriftsprachen der Gegenwart (Versuch einer Klassifikation und einer strukturell-semantischen Analyse). Amsterdam: Adolph M. Hakkert.Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin and Stefan T. Gries. 2009. Assessing frequency changes in multistage diachronic corpora: Application for historical corpus linguistics and the study of language acquisition. Literary and Linguistic Computing 24(4). 385–401. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2016. Quantitative approaches to diachronic corpus linguistics. In Merja Kytö and Pāivi Pahta (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of English historical linguistics, 36–53. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holland, Paul W. and Roy E. Welsch. 1977. Robust regression using iteratively reweighted least-squares. Communications in Statistics – Theory and Methods 6(9). 813–827. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jameson, Kimberly A. and Roy G. D’Andrade. 1997. It’s not really red, green, yellow, blue: An inquiry into cognitive color space. In Clyde L. Hardin & Luisa Maffi (eds.), Color categories in thought and language, 295–318. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Joula, Patrick. 2003. The time course of language change. Computers and the Humanities 371. 77–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jraissati, Yasmina and Igor Douven. 2017. Does optimal partitioning of color space account for universal color categorization? PLoS ONE 12(6). e0178083. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kay, Paul. 2015. Universality of color categorization. In Andrew J. Elliot, Mark D. Fairchild, and Anna Franklin (eds.), Handbook of color psychology, 245–258. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kay, Paul and Luisa Maffi. 1999. Color appearance and the emergence and evolution of basic color lexicons. American Anthropologist 1011. 743–760. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koplenig, Alexander. 2017. The impact of lacking metadata for the measurement of cultural and linguistic change using the Google Ngram data sets – Reconstructing the composition of the German corpus in times of WWII. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32(1). 169–188. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria, Ekaterina Rakhilina, and Martine Vanhove. 2015. The semantics of lexical typology. In Nick Riemer (ed.), The Routledge handbook of semantics, 434–454. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Krivko, Roman. 2021. Old East Slavic. In Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf (eds.), A cultural history of color in the Medieval Age, 124–128. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Kulkarni, V., Al-Rfou, R., Perozzi, B., & Skiena, S. (2015). Statistically significant detection of linguistic change. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web, May 2015, Florence (pp. 625–635). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kul’pina, Valentina G. 2001. Lingvistika cveta. Terminy cveta v pol’skom i russkom jazykax [Linguistics of colour. Colour terms in Polish and Russian]. Moscow: Russkie slovari (in Russian).Google Scholar
2007. Sistema cvetooboznačenij russkogo jazyka [The system of Russian colour terms]. In Aleksandr P. Vasilevich (ed.), Naimenovanija cveta v indoevropejskix jazykax: Sistemnyj i istoričeskij analiz [Colour terms in Indo-European languages: Systematic and historical analysis], 126–184. Moscow: KomKniga (in Russian).Google Scholar
2019. Lingvističeskaja cvetologija: ot istorii k sovremennosti cvetovyx konceptosfer [Linguistic colour theory: From history to modernity of coloristic conceptual spheres]. Moscow: MAKS Press (in Russian).Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Yélî Dnye and the theory of basic color terms. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10(1). 3–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lin, Yuri, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez L. Aiden, Jon Orwant, Will Brockman, and Slav Petrov. 2012. Syntactic annotations for the Google Books Ngram corpus. In Proceedings of the ACL 2012 System Demonstrations, 169–174. Association for Computational Linguistics. [URL]
Lopatin, Vladimir V. 2013. Tolkovyj slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo jazyka [A glossary of modern Russian]. Moscow: Èksmo (in Russian).Google Scholar
Lucy, John A. 1997. The linguistics of “color”. In Clyde L. Hardin and Luisa Maffi (eds.), Color categories in thought and language, 320–346. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lyashevskaya, Olga N. and Sergei A. Sharov. 2009. Častotnyj slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo jazyka (na naterialax Nacional’nogo korpusa russkogo jazyka) [Frequency dictionary of the modern Russian language (the Russian National Corpus)]. Moscow: Azbukovnik (in Russian).Google Scholar
Lyons, John. 1995. Colour in language. In Trevor Lamb, and Janine Bourriau (eds.), Colour: Art and science, 194–234. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
MacLaury, Robert E. 1991. Social and cognitive motivations of change: Measuring variability in color semantics. Language 67(1). 34–62. [URL]
1992. From brightness to hue: An explanatory model of color-term evolution [and comments and reply]. Current Anthropology 33(2). 137–186. [URL]
1997. Color and cognition in Mesoamerica: Constructing categories as vantages. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
2007. Categories of desaturated-complex color. Sensorial, perceptual, and cognitive models. In Robert E. MacLaury, Galina V. Paramei, and Don Dedrick (eds.), Anthropology of color: Interdisciplinary multilevel modeling, 125–150. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Michel, Jean-Baptiste, Yuan K. Shen, Aviva P. Aiden, Adrian Veres, A. et al. 2011. Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science 331(6014). 176–182. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morgan, Gerry and Greville Corbett. 1989. Russian colour term salience. Russian Linguistics 13(2). 125–141. [URL]. DOI logo
Nicklas, Charlotte. 2017. New words and fanciful names: Dyes, color and fashion in the mid-nineteenth century. In Regina L. Blaszczyk and Uwe Spiekermann (eds.), Bright modernity. Color, commerce and consumer culture, 97–111. New York: Palgrave McMillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
OpenCorpora, n.d. [URL]
Paramei, Galina V. and David L. Bimler. 2021. Language and psychology. In Anders Steinvall and Sarah Street (eds.), A cultural history of color. The Modern Age: From 1920 to present, 117–134. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Paramei, Galina V., Yulia A. Griber, and Dimitris Mylonas. 2018. An online color naming experiment in Russian using Munsell color samples. Color Research & Application 43(3). 358–374. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pechenick, Eitan A., Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter S. Dodds. 2015. Characterizing the Google Books corpus: Strong limits to inferences of socio-cultural and linguistic evolution. PLoS ONE 10(10). e0137041. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Peers, E. Allison, José V. Barragán, Francesco A. Vinyals, and Jorge A. Mora. (eds.). 1959. Cassell’s Spanish Dictionary: Spanish-English, English-Spanish. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.Google Scholar
Rakhilina, Ekaterina V. 2007a. Linguistic construal of colors: The case of Russian. In Robert E. MacLaury, Galina V. Paramei, and Don Dedrick (eds.), Anthropology of color: Interdisciplinary multilevel modeling, 363–377. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007b. O semantike prilagatel’nyx cveta [On semantics of colour adjectives]. In Aleksandr P. Vasilevich (ed.), Naimenovanija cveta v indoevropejskix jazykax: Sistemnyj i istoričeskij analiz [Colour terms in Indo-European languages: Systematic and historical analysis], 29–39. Moscow: KomKniga (in Russian).Google Scholar
2008. Kognitivnyj analiz predmetnyx imen: semantika i sočetaemost’ [Cognitive analysis of object names: Semantics and combinability]. 2nd ed. Moscow: Russkie slovari (in Russian).Google Scholar
Rakhilina, Ekaterina V. and Galina V. Paramei. 2011. Colour terms: Evolution via expansion of taxonomic constraints. In Carole P. Biggam, Carole A. Hough, Christian J. Kay, and David R. Simmons (eds.), New directions in colour studies, 121–131. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Regier, Terry, Paul Kay, and Khetarpal. 2007. Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. 104(4). 1436–1441. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Richey, Sean and J. Benjamin Taylor. (2020). Google Books Ngrams and political science: Two validity tests for a novel data source. PS: Political Science & Politics 53(1). 72–77. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Russian National Corpus, n.d. [URL]
Safuanova, Olga V. and Nina N. Korzh. 2007. Russian color names. Mapping into a perceptual color space. In Robert E. MacLaury, Galina V. Paramei, and Don Dedrick (eds.), Anthropology of color: Interdisciplinary multilevel modeling, 55–74. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Saunders, Barbara A. C. and Jan van Brakel. 1997. Are there non-trivial constraints on colour categorisation? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20(2). 167–228. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Slovari russkogo jazyka 11–17 vekov: Ètimologija i istorija slov russkogo jazyka [Dictionaries of the Russian language of the 11th–17th centuries: Etymology and history of Russian words]. 1975–. Moscow: Nauka (in Russian).Google Scholar
Slovar’ Akademii Rossijskoj [Dictionary of the Russian Academy] (1789–1794). St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences (in Russian).Google Scholar
Solovyev, Valery D., Vladimir V. Bochkarev, and Svetlana S. Akhtyamova. 2020. Google Books Ngram: Problems of representativeness and data reliability. In Alexander Elizarov, Boris Novikov, and Sergey Stupnikov (eds.), Data Analytics and Management in Data Intensive Domains. DAMDID/RCDL 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science Vol. 12231, 147–162. Cham: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steels, Luc. 2011. Modeling the cultural evolution of language. Physics of Life Reviews 8(4). 339–356. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steels, Luc and Tom Belpaeme. 2005. Coordinating perceptually grounded categories through language: A case study for colour. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 281. 469–489. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steinvall, Anders. 2002. English colour terms in context. PhD thesis. Umeå University.
Street, James O., Raymond J. Carroll, and David Ruppert. 1988. A note on computing robust regression estimates via iteratively reweighted least squares. The American Statistician 42(2). 152–154. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Swearingen, Andrew. 2014. From blood to worms: The semantic evolution of a Portuguese colour term. In Wendy Anderson, Carole P. Biggam, Carole Hough, and Christian Kay (eds.), Colour studies: A broad spectrum, 79–92. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tahmasebi, Nina, Lars Borin, and Adam Jatowt. 2021. Survey of computational approaches to lexical semantic change detection. In Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu, and Simon Hengchen (eds.), Computational approaches to semantic change, 1–9. Berlin: Language Science Press. [URL]
Tang, Xuri. 2018. A state-of-the-art of semantic change computation. Natural Language Engineering 24(5). 649–676. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ulukhanov, Igor S. 2015. Glagol’noe slovoobrazovanie sovremennogo russkogo jazyka [Adverbial derivation of modern Russian]. Vol. I1. Glagoly, motivirovannye imenami i meždometijami [The verbs motivated by proper names and interjections]. Moscow: Azbukovnik (in Russian).Google Scholar
van Leijenhorst, Dick C., and Theo P. van der Weide. 2005. A formal derivation of Heaps’ Law. Information Sciences 170(2–4). 263–272. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vasilevich, Alexandr P., Svetlana N. Kuznecova, and Sergei S. Mishchenko. 2016. Cvet i nazvanija cveta v russkom jazyke [Colour and colour terms in the Russian language]. Moscow: LCI Publisher (in Russian).Google Scholar
Villanueva Gesteira, María D. 2009. O campo semántico das cores visto por tres xeracións [The semantic domain of colours viewed by three generations]. Estudos de Lingüística Galega 11. 169–188 (in Galician).Google Scholar
Werner, Heinz. 2004. Comparative psychology of mental development (with a new prologue by Margery B. Franklin). Clinton Corners, NY: Percheron Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2005. There are no “color universals” but there are universals of visual semantics. Anthropological Linguistics 471. 217–244. [URL]
Worth, Dean S., Andrew S. Kozak, and Donald B. Johnson. 1970. Russian derivational dictionary. New York: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Zaslavsky, Noga, Charles Kemp, Naftali Tishby, and Terry Regier. 2020. Communicative need in color naming. Cognitive Neuropsychology 371. 312–324. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zaslavsky, Noga, Karee Garvin, Charles Kemp, Naftali Tishby, and Terry Regier. 2022. The evolution of color naming reflects pressure for efficiency: Evidence from the recent past. Journal of Language Evolution. Early view. lzac001. DOI logoGoogle Scholar