05/08/2025
In their book "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution", Brent Berlin and Paul Kay used data collected from twenty different languages from a range of language families to identify eleven possible basic color categories: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray.
Berlin and Kay found that, in languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern. This pattern is as follows:
1. All languages contain terms for black (cool colours) and white (bright colours).
2. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
3. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
4. If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
5. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
6. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
6. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange or gray.
Source:
On most terminals it is possible to colorize output using the \033 ANSI escape sequence. I'm looking for a list of all supported colors and options (like bright and blinking). As there are probably