Apparently languages differ in the number of basic colour words they have (basic ones being those with a simple name rather than a compound one (blue rather than sky blue or greenish blue) and reasonably common (no cerise)). It seems that if you know how many of these basic colour words a language has it's possible to make a pretty good guess which ones are in and which ones aren't.
The list (from David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language) goes:
* black and white
* red
* green yellow
* blue
* brown
* purple pink orange grey
So a language that has a word lower down the list (brown for example) will have all the words higher up the list, but may or may not have the words lower down the list. Where there's more than one word in a slot the order in which they're added is random. A language with four words, for example, may have black, white, red, green or black, white, red, yellow.
Bingley
