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By retrospecting a lot of studies on color words both at home and abroad, we may see that color vision, color perception, and some other perspectives about color have attracted a lot of attention in many scientific fields, ranging from philosophy, sociology and linguistics to physiology, psychology, and genetics.
The study of color has a long history. About 2500 years ago, some studies about color words were done in western countries. It is Plato who is the first person devoted himself to the researches on colors. And his perceptions of colors are regarded as the classic theories of colors. His theories are not only used as the basis of the physical field, but also as the fundamental theories in other fields such as philosophy, psychology, linguistics and so on. Aristotle is also a scholar who had done some researches on colors. In his article “On Colors”, he put the views that there existed a relationship between simple colors and some basic elements in the physical world such as fire, water and earth. And he expressed that simple colors were the mixtures of “black” and “white”. (168)
In addition, some scholars cherished the view that linguistic universality and semantic evolution reflect that the color word system generally has the characteristics. Before that, many scholars consider that the color word study can offer a typical cross-cultural example to support the linguistic relative theory, because the meanings of color words in a certain language make US know the characteristics of the society and thus it is culture-determined to some extent. So Berlin and Kay made a great progress in linguistic universality. (Xu 5)
Compared with the studies abroad, Chinese people have done this research are much later and limited. They began more than 2,000 years ago and mainly from two perspectives---linguistics and cognition. But there are still so many scholars and works have provided attributions to the research of color words and color characters in China.
Although color terms have been studied on from different angles, it may be feasible to state that these researches were made mainly on color terms in one language. However, we now live in a world in which we increasingly interact with people from different cultures instead of isolated countries respectively. Therefore, a contrastive analysis of color terms in different cultures is essential in the study of color terms. Accordingly, based on all previous achievements made by the earlier scholars who have worked hard in this field, it is possible for the author of this paper to try to make a comparatively detailed study of the common features of the color words.