The evolution of basic color terms in Chinese

Abstract

This paper makes an attempt to construct a framework of how Chinese basic color terms evolve over the past 4000 years, which is divided into several periods, by an analysis of the relevant literature in history on the basis of word frequency counts. Then we discuss what stage each period should be classified into under Berlin & Kay's framework and its recent developments. Against these findings, the similarities and differences between our corpus and Berlin & Kay's assumptions are analyzed and presented. In addition, the replacement of Chi by Hong is also discussed with reference to the Lexical Diffusion theory.