T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics shares with us some linguistic universals.
Of course, he’s talking about absolute universals (like the fact that all human languages use nouns and verbs), but don’t forget that there are lots of implicational universals. If a language has a word for ‘blue’, it will also have a word for ‘red’, but not the reverse. Or if a language has a word for ‘toes’, it’ll have a word for ‘legs’, but not the reverse.
T-Rex would probably like to know that some languages have no word for ‘fingers’, since he’s a bit short in that department.
10 July 2009 at 6:58 pm
I get toes and leg but why blue and red?
11 July 2009 at 1:10 am
Berlin and Kay took an inventory of the words that different languages use for color. They found that if a language has only two words for color, it's always black and white (or something like 'light' and 'dark'). If there's a third term, it's always red. The fourth color is always either yellow or green, the fifth is the other one that didn't get chosen fourth, and blue is sixth.
So lots of languages have red and not blue, but not the reverse. I don't know why. Funny little thing.