Preliminary Study of Basic Colour Terms in Modern Hungarian
Preliminary Study of Basic Colour Terms in Modern Hungarian

Summary/Abstract: Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, in their seminal work "Basic Color Terms" (1969), supposed that there are exceptionally 12 (instead of 11) basic colour terms in Hungarian. They argued that there are two basic terms - piros and vörös - for the red region. Our empirical study shows that there are exactly 11 basic colour terms in modern Hungarian. Ranked by the cognitive salience index proposed by U. Sutrop (2001) they are: piros 'red', kék 'blue', zöld 'green', sárga 'yellow', fehér 'white', fekete 'black', lila 'purple', barna 'brown', szürke 'grey', rózsaszín 'pink' and narancssárga 'orange'. Second term for red vörös is not basic in Hungarian. Hungarian encodes the basic colour terms in the universal way.

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