Paul Kay

Paul Kay (* 1934 in New York City ) is an American linguist and anthropologist.

Life

He is emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and, together with Brent Berlin , author of a well-known study on color terms in the languages ​​of the world ( Basic Color Terms ).

After successfully completing his BA in economics at Tulane University, Phi Beta Kappa in 1955, he married Patricia Ann Boehm a year later, with whom he has two children (born in 1961 and 1963). Paul Kay completed his military service in the United States Army from 1958 and received a doctorate in social anthropology from Harvard University in 1963 . The following stations and occupations were:

• 1963–64 postdoc at Stanford University .
• 1964–65 Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
• 1965–66 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California

From 1966 to 1969, Paul Kay was promoted to Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley and, in 1967, was also head of research at the Language Behavior Research Laboratory, UC Berkeley, which he remained until 1974. Paul Kay remained professionally loyal to Berkeley and taught from 1970 to 1982 as a professor of anthropology and then until 1995 linguistics at UC

In 1997 Kay was elected to the National Academy of Sciences .

Publications

• with Brent Berlin : Basic Color Terms. Their Universality and Evolution. University of California Press, Berkeley CA 1969.

See also

• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis