In the 1860s, the german philologist lazarus geiger proposed that the subdivision of color always follows the same hierarchy. the simplest color lexicons (such as the dugermdani language of new guinea) distinguish only black/dark and white/light. the next color to be given a separate word by cultures is always centered on the red part of the visible spectrum. then, according to geiger, societies will adopt a word corresponding to yellow, then green, then blue. lazarus’s color hierarchy was forgotten until restated in almost the same form in 1969 by brent berlin, an anthropologist, and paul kay, a linguist, when it was hailed as a major discovery in modern linguistics. it showed a universal regularity underlying the apparently arbitrary way language is used: