PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Zaslavsky, Noga
AU  - Garvin, Karee
AU  - Kemp, Charles
AU  - Tishby, Naftali
AU  - Regier, Terry
TI  - The evolution of color naming reflects pressure for efficiency: Evidence from the recent past
AID  - 10.1101/2021.11.03.467047
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.11.03.467047
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/11/16/2021.11.03.467047.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/11/16/2021.11.03.467047.full
AB  - It has been proposed that semantic systems evolve under pressure for efficiency. This hypothesis has so far been supported largely indirectly, by synchronic cross-language comparison, rather than directly by diachronic data. Here, we directly test this hypothesis in the domain of color naming, by analyzing recent diachronic data from Nafaanra, a language of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and comparing it with quantitative predictions derived from the mathematical theory of efficient data compression. We show that color naming in Nafaanra has changed over the past four decades while remaining near-optimally efficient, and that this outcome would be unlikely under a random drift process that maintains structured color categories without pressure for efficiency. To our knowledge, this finding provides the first direct evidence that color naming evolves under pressure for efficiency, supporting the hypothesis that efficiency shapes the evolution of the lexicon.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.