Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution

Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's 1969 academic monograph from the University of California Press, established that languages acquire a small set of basic color terms in a strongly constrained cross linguistic order, from dark and light, through red, then green or yellow, then blue, then brown, purple, pink, orange and grey. Its strength is that it is the founding study of the field of basic color term linguistics, still the standard citation for the claim. Its limit, stated as a scope note, is that its own subject is cross linguistic color term acquisition and categorization, not the separate history of pigments and dyes or the photometry of human color vision; cite it only for the linguistic typology claim, never for a pigment history or vision science claim appearing in the same passage.