Colour words get their meanings from their mutual contrasts. The field of visually discriminable hues is very large and goes far beyond the resources of any vocabulary as it is normally used. Children learn the central or basic colour words of their language fairly early and at the same time; such terms as red and green are normally learned before subdivisions such as crimson and scarlet or chartreuse. It is well known that languages make their primary divisions of the spectrum of colours in different places; Japanese aoi covers many of the hues referred to in English by green and blue, while blue covers much of the range of the two Russian words goluboy and siny. While the actual colour vocabularies of languages differ, however, research by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in the 1960s sought to show that “there exist universally for humans eleven basic perceptual color categories” that serve as reference points for the colour words of a language, whatever number may be regularly employed at any time. The claim remains controversial.
Ordinarily, considerable areas of indeterminate designation in colour vocabulary and in other fields are tolerated; between red and purple and between purple and blue, there are hues that one would hesitate to assign firmly to one or the other and on which there would be considerable personal disagreement. When greater precision than normal is required—as, for example, in listing paint or textile colours—all kinds of additional terms can be brought into service to supplement the usual vocabulary: off-white, light cream, lemon, blush pink, and so on.
The vocabulary of kinship terms varies from language to language, reflecting cultural differences. English distinguishes the nearer kinsfolk by sex: mother, father; sister, brother; aunt, uncle; and others. Other languages, such as Malay, make a lexical distinction of age the primary one, with separate words for elder brother or sister and younger brother or sister. Still other languages—for example, some American Indian ones—use different words for the sister of a man and for the sister of a woman. But beyond this any language can be as precise as the situation demands in kin designation. When it is necessary, English speakers can specify elder sister and female cousin, and within the overall category it is possible to distinguish first and second cousins and cousins once removed, distinctions that it is ordinarily pedantic to make.
The best example of infinite precision available from a strictly limited lexical stock is in the field of arithmetic. Between any two whole numbers a further fractional or decimal number may always be inserted, and this may go on indefinitely: between 10 and 11, 10 1/2 (10.5), 10 1/4 (10.25), 10 1/8 (10.125), and so on. Thus, mathematicians and physical scientists are able to achieve any desired degree of quantitative precision appropriate to their purposes, and hence the importance of quantitative statements in the sciences; any thermometric scale contains far more distinctions of temperature than are reasonably available in the vocabulary of a language (hot, warm, cool, tepid, cold, and so on). For this reason mathematics has been described as the “ideal use of language.” This characterization, however, applies to relatively few areas of expression, and for many purposes in everyday life the very imprecision of natural languages is the source of their strength and adaptability. Neologisms
Every living language can readily be adapted to meet changes occurring in the life and culture of its speakers, and the main weight of such changes falls on vocabulary. Grammatical and phonological structures are relatively stable and change noticeably over centuries rather than decades (see below Linguistic change), but vocabularies can change very quickly both in word stock and in word meanings. Among the drivers of this sort of change, technology is among the most significant.
Every language can alter its vocabulary very easily, which means that every user can without effort adopt new words, accept or invent new meanings for existing words, and, of course, cease to use some words or cease to use them in certain meanings. Dictionaries identify some words and some meanings as “obsolete” or “obsolescent” to indicate this process. No two speakers share precisely the same vocabulary of words readily used and readily understood, though they may speak the same dialect. They will, however, naturally have the great majority of words in their vocabularies in common.
Languages have various resources for effecting changes in vocabulary. Meanings of existing words may change. With the virtual disappearance of falconry as a sport in England, lure has lost its original meaning of a bunch of feathers on a string by which hawks were recalled to their handler and is used now mainly in its metaphorical sense of enticement. Words such as computer and jet acquired new ranges of meaning in the mid-20th century.
All languages have the means of creating new words to bear new meanings. These can be new creations; chortle, which entered into general use in the 20th century, was a jocular creation of the English writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll (creator of Alice in Wonderland), and gas was formed in the 17th century by the Belgian chemist and physician Jan Baptista van Helmont as a technical term in chemistry, loosely modeled on the Greek chaos (“formless void”). Mostly, though, languages follow definite patterns in their innovations. Words can be made up without limit from existing words or from parts of words; the sources of railroad and aircraft are obvious. The controversy over the relations between church and state in the 19th and early 20th centuries gave rise to a chain of new words as the debate proceeded: disestablishmentarian, antidisestablishmentarian, antidisestablishmentarianism. Usually, the bits and pieces of words used in this way are those found in other such combinations, but this is not always so. The term permafrost (terrain that is perennially frozen) contains a bit of permanent probably not hitherto found in any other word.
A particular source of technical neologisms in European languages has been the words and word elements of Latin and Greek. This is part of the cultural history of western Europe, in so many ways the continuation of Greco-Roman civilization. Microbiology and dolichocephalic are words well formed according to the rules of Greek as they would be taken over into English, but no records survive of mikrobiologia and dolichokephalikos ever having been used in Ancient Greek. The same is true of Latinate creations such as reinvestment and longiverbosity. The long tradition of looking to Latin and, since the Renaissance, to Greek also as the languages of European civilization keeps alive the continuing formation of learned and scientific vocabulary in English and other European languages from these sources (late 20th-century coinages using the Greek prefix cyber- provide an example). The dependence on the classical languages in Europe is matched by a similar use of Sanskrit words for certain parts of learned vocabulary in some modern Indian languages (Sanskrit being the classical language of India). Such phenomena are examples of loanwords, one of the readiest sources for vocabulary extension.