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“Culture, is too inclusive a concept to define, many philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and linguists, from perspectives of different fields, to make satisfactory definitions for it.”(Kramsch, 1998) Due to the differences between the two cultures including the natural environment, religions and the customs, the expressions of each language are also different. In these rich and colorful expressions, the two nations have their own perception of the color symbols and their own association and understanding are influenced by color.
Generally speaking, the color words in English can be pided into two categories: basic color terms and object color terms whose counterparts can also be found in Chinese. There are so many colors words both in English and in Chinese that we can’t analyze them one by one, therefore, I choose the basic color terms to discuss in this paper.
However, it’s difficult to give a definite and accurate definition to them. Many scholars have studied the basic color words, such as Berlin and Kay (1969), Casson and Saeed (2000). Among those various versions, the one written by Berlin and Kay is the most famous. In their Basic Color Terms: Their University and Evolution, Berlin and Kay lay out four basic criteria to judge whether a color word is basic or not. According to the criterion, the eleven basic color categories are white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and gray.