  There is an extensive history of scholarship into what constitutes a "basic"
color term, as well as a broadly attested acquisition sequence of basic color
terms across many languages, as articulated in the seminal work of Berlin and
Kay (1969). This paper employs a set of diverse measures on massively
cross-linguistic data to operationalize and critique the Berlin and Kay color
term hypotheses. Collectively, the 14 empirically-grounded computational
linguistic metrics we design---as well as their aggregation---correlate
strongly with both the Berlin and Kay basic/secondary color term partition
(gamma=0.96) and their hypothesized universal acquisition sequence. The
measures and result provide further empirical evidence from computational
linguistics in support of their claims, as well as additional nuance: they
suggest treating the partition as a spectrum instead of a dichotomy.
