Letter: Loss of color terms not demonstrated : supporting details

Abstract

Haynie and Bowern [Haynie HJ, Bowern C (2016) PNAS 113(48):13666–13671] matched Bayesian phylogenies for 189 Pama–Nyungan languages with the presence of color terms in each vocabulary. The inferred ancestral state reconstructions led to their striking claim of ‘extensive evidence for the loss (as well as gain) of color terms’, as well as the expected ‘broad support for the most influential theory of color term development’ based on the World Color Survey [Kay P, Berlin B, Maffi L, Merrifield WR, Cook R (2009) CSLI lecture notes 159, Stanford, CA]. However their inference is invalidated by the method for selecting the vocabulary data, its patchiness, and their method’s assumption that every unknown or missing datum is a true absence. Show more