That doesn't break the Berlin-Kay pattern though. If a language only has terms for "white", "black", "red" and "yellow", that doesn't mean that they can't name any colours that don't fall into what an English speaker would consider those colours to be. It just means that the definitions are broader - like in those languages that lack a distinction between "blue" and "green". When such a distinction is absent, that doesn't mean one of those colours doesn't have a name: it means that both "blue" and "green" fall under the same term.
The question is where languages draw borders between colors. The HolQeD article I dimly remember argued that grouping yellow with green/blue is so odd it's almost alien and speculated that MO knew about the Berlin-Kay hierarchy, and had it mind when he made up the word SuD in 1984.
My memory of the thing Okrand did intentionally was that according to Berlin-Kay, yellow tends to either have it’s own word, or it is grouped with red and orange.
That's it! That's what I was trying to remember.
The Klingon system groups it with blue and green, which makes sense if you look at a spectrum and see that it is arbitrary whether it is grouped with red/orange or green/blue, but languages generally tend to group it with red/orange.
There is no technical reason why human languages group yellow with red and orange. They just do.
I think there is a technical reason based on human color perception, but I don't know enough about that to defend the argument. But I will make one argument:t he fact that so many of the world's languages seem to fit Berlin-Kay suggests that where languages draw borders between colors is not arbitrary. When a 90% majority of humans (or human languages) independently make the same decision, it's probably not arbitrary.
What's more, subsequent work has shown that the Berlin-Kay hierarchy isn't universal; it only describes a tendency. Ubykh, for instance, has basic terms for white, black, red, yellow, and blue/green, but also has a term for grey, which breaks across several levels of the Berlin-Kay model.
I understand that in linguistics "universals" are statistical tendencies and not absolutes. I also understand that there are ongoing debates about color terminology and that Berlin-Kay is in no way the last word. That said, while Ubykh breaks the Berlin-Kay model, it doesn't contradict the HolQeD article's argument that grouping yellow with green/blue is weird and that MO had Berlin-Kay in mind when he made that choice.
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