Color Naming and Communication of Color Appearance: Is it Different for Native Georgian Speakers?

Abstract

Color is one of the most prominent appearance attributes. The terms used by humans to communicate color appearance and to set categorical boundaries in the color space have long been a point of scholarly interest. Two conflicting theories of universal and culture-relative color naming have been addressed by numerous studies. While the characteristics of color naming have been studied in considerable number of languages, the quantity of basic color terms and the variation of color categories across the languages is still a matter of an ongoing debate. Color naming in English is widely explored and compared with numerous languages, including the languages of non-industrialized societies. Being the unrelated languages, we hypothesize that the basic color terms and the categorical boundaries vary between the English and Georgian languages. To test this hypothesis, we conducted experiments with native Georgian speakers and compared the results with the state-of-the-art in context of English. The results have revealed interesting differences as well as similarities that are worth exploring further.