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English has 11 basic color terms: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple, and gray; other languages have between 2 and 12. All other colors are considered by most speakers of that language to be variants of these basic color terms.
If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange or gray. In addition to following this evolutionary pattern absolutely, each of the languages studied also selected virtually identical focal hues for each color category present.
The following is a list of English words without rhymes, called refractory rhymes—that is, a list of words in the English language that rhyme with no other English word. The word "rhyme" here is used in the strict sense, called a perfect rhyme , that the words are pronounced the same from the vowel of the main stressed syllable onwards.
According to Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's 1969 study Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, distinct terms for brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray will not emerge in a language until the language has made a distinction between green and blue.
In common English usage, purple is a range of hues of color occurring between red and blue. However, the meaning of the term purple is not well defined. There is confusion about the meaning of the terms purple and violet even among native speakers of English.
In the English language, the word "purple" has only one perfect rhyme, curple. Others are obscure perfect rhymes, such as hirple. Robert Burns rhymes purple with curple in his Epistle to Mrs. Scott. Examples of imperfect rhymes or non-word rhymes with purple: In the song Grace Kelly by Mika the word purple is rhymed with "hurtful".
Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969; ISBN 1-57586-162-3) is a book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. Berlin and Kay's work proposed that the basic color terms in a culture, such as black, brown, or red, are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has. All cultures have terms for black/dark and white/bright.
List of English words of Indonesian origin, including from Javanese, Malay (Sumatran) Sundanese, Papuan (West Papua), Balinese, Dayak and other local languages in Indonesia. List of English words of Irish origin. List of Irish words used in the English language. List of English words of Italian origin.
A classifier, or measure word, is a word or morpheme used in some languages together with a noun, principally to enable numbers and certain other determiners to be applied to the noun. They are not regularly used in English or other European languages, although they parallel the use of words such as piece(s) and head in phrases like "three ...
In other texts it is the term violet that covers the same full range of colors. The uncertainty about the range of meanings of the color terms violet and purple is even larger when other languages and historical texts are considered. Variations of spectral violet