“The two American linguists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay established that not all languages possess the same number of basic color names. A short word which was neither further separable nor in use as a description of a material was accepted as being a basic name. Yellow and green thus count as basic names, but not dark yellow or turquoise. Of almost one hundred different languages investigated, none had less than two nor more than eleven such basic names.

More exact evaluation reveals how the corresponding color vocabulary of a language appears to conform to a certain sequence. If a language only has two color words, these will be black (or dark) and white (or bright). Red will always be the first chromatic word to be found in addition to these two. The fourth basic name is then either green or yellow, and a language with five expressions for color exhibits the sequence black, white, red, green, and yellow. Blue appears only in sixth place, with brown seventh. Up to this point, there has been a specific hierarchy; beyond it, color vocabulary is supplemented by the quartet of violet, orange, pink, and gray in an arbitrary order.”

—from Color Systems in Art and Science, edited by Klaus Stromer, translated from the German by Randy Cassada, 1999.