History constrains the evolution of efficient color naming, enabling historical inference

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Twomey, Colin R.; Brainard, David H.; Plotkin, Joshua B.
• 署名单位: University of Pennsylvania; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pennsylvania
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-9566
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2313603121
• 发表日期: 2024-03-05
• 关键词: language; appearance; CATEGORIES

摘要

Color naming in natural languages is not arbitrary: It reflects efficient partitions of 104, 1436-1441 (2007)] modulated by the relative needs to communicate about Sci. U.S.A. 118, e2109237118 (2021)]. These psychophysical and communicative constraints help explain why languages around the world have remarkably similar, but not identical, mappings of colors to color terms. Languages converge on a small set of efficient representations.But languages also evolve, and the number of terms in a color vocabulary may change over time. Here we show that history, i.e. the existence of an antecedent color vocabulary, acts as a nonadaptive constraint that biases the choice of efficient solution as a language transitions from a vocabulary of size n to n + 1 terms. Moreover, as efficient vocabularies evolve to include more terms they explore a smaller fraction of all possible efficient vocabularies compared to equally sized vocabularies constructed de novo. This path dependence of the cultural evolution of color naming presents an opportunity. Historical constraints can be used to reconstruct ancestral color vocabularies, allowing us to answer long-standing questions about the evolutionary sequences of color words, and enabling us to draw inferences from phylogenetic patterns of language change.