In the mid-1960s Berlin and Kay ended up at Berkeley. They had their graduate students scour the Bay Area for native speakers of foreign languages, quizzing them with standard color chips, not unlike those used as samples for paint. Their object was to establish the meanings of basic color terms--that is, those that could not be analyzed into simpler terms (such as "blue-green") and were not defined as characteristic of a given object (such as "salmon"). Later Berlin and Kay collaborated with other researchers to expand their sample to 110 languages.

Color lexicons vary, first of all, in sheer size: English has 11 basic terms, Russian and Hungarian have 12, yet the New Guinean language Dani has just two. One of the two encompasses black, green, blue and other "cool" colors; the other encompasses white, red, yellow and other "warm" colors. Those languages with only three terms almost always have "black-cool," "white-light" and "red-yellow-warm." Those having a fourth usually carve out "grue" from the "black-cool" term.

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One of the most interesting inquiries into these questions is being conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where Stephen C. Levinson and his associates are studying the psychological consequences of the differing ways in which languages describe space. Several languages lack subjective terms analogous to "left" and "right," using instead absolute directions, akin to "north" and "south." In such a language, one might say, "There's a fly to the north of your nose."

Presented with an arrow pointing to their left, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, a language of Australia, will later draw it pointing to the left only if they are still facing in the direction in which they saw the arrow in the first place. If, however, they turn around, they will draw it pointing to the right--that is, in the same absolute direction as the original arrow.