Fruits and plants, grains and seeds, birds, precious metals, and substances, or the conceptualization of colors in Tunisian Arabic

Abstract

Two opposed views dominate the color scene: Universalism and relativism. Each view has been shown to have fallen short of fully accounting for color perception and naming across languages and cultures. Beyond this controversy, the current article proposes cultural neuroscience as an alternative view to account for color naming and the conceptualization of experiences in color terms in Tunisian Arabic (TA). Cultural neuroscience accumulated massive cross-cultural empirical evidence to the effect that culture greatly impacts brain and cognition. The current article will draw on cultural neuroscience to explain the central role played by culture in shaping cognition and language. Thus, the argument will run as follows: The language in which color is cloaked owes much to experience in social cognition, which is greatly impacted by the cultural environment. This view implies that color naming is under the influence of the cultural needs of color users and cognizers in their respective cultures, with the language they speak as ancillary to culture. In TA, there are 11 color terms, with five focal colors including multiple shades and a form in mes– (–ish), reminiscent of English brownish from brown. Color naming in TA is conceptualized in terms of names of fruits (oranges, apricots, peaches, dates), plants (Jew’s mallow), aromatic plants (lavender), grains (wheat), birds (canary), seeds (pistachio), precious metals (gold), and substances (honey, coffee, chocolate, ash). Color is also manifest as a source domain in various metaphoric and metonymic expressions to conceptualize experiences and events using verbal, nominal, and adjectival derivations.