NATLANG: Colors

Oh, I just remembered one.   One universal (and I'm pretty sure this is a
universal) is that a language will have *at most* 11 *basic* color terms
(obviously, a language like English has an infinite amount, since the class is open
[i.e., if I say "Denver Nuggets blue", all you need to know is that the Denver
Nuggets is a basketball team, and that their logo and uniforms have a
particular type of blue to know the color I'm referring to], but it has only 11 *basic*
color terms [I forget what the evidence for their being basic was]).
There's apparently psychological evidence from Russian, though, to argue for Russian
having 12 basic color terms, where one color (I don't know the words) refers
to light blue, and another refers to dark blue.   I don't know how they tested
this (I mean, aside from the fact that the terms are morphologically basic),
but it apparently holds that neither of these blues is the more basic blue,
and that these are just as morphologically and cognitively basic as, say, red,
black, yellow, white, etc.

-David
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