The linguistics of colour names

The news website Vox has produced some good videos on linguistic topics, which can be found amidst their many other clips. Its latest one looks at the vexed question of colour names and categories in different languages, and in 6½ minutes it offers a decent summary:

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The video touches on Homer’s wine-dark sea, anthropological racism, and recent research revising the colour sequence made famous by Berlin and Kay’s influential work. It doesn’t mention Lazarus Geiger, the German philologist who proposed essentially the same sequence a century earlier – but then, it is just an overview.

For more on the subject (and other aspects of linguistic relativity), Guy Deutscher’s book Through the Language Glass is a balanced and enlightening read.