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I think Hungarian has the same distinction with piros versus vörös: https://www.academia.edu/7375817/The_Hungarian_color_terms_piros_and_vörös_A_corpus_and_cogn

I think Hungarian has the same distinction with piros versus vörös: https://www.academia.edu/7375817/The_Hungarian_color_terms_piros_and_vörös_A_corpus_and_cognitive_linguistic_investigation https://www.academia.edu/7375817/The_Hungarian_color_terms_p...

biztos 10y ago
Indeed, Piros and vörös are completely distinct, and nobody who speaks Hungarian would have any doubt what colors they indicate; and it's generally obvious when looking at a reddish color whether you're talking about piros (a brighter red, as in Red Riding Hood) or vörös (a darker red, as in Red Wine). For English speakers, in everyday usage both are just "red." English has more specific words for red but we don't use them much. This is a great example of why context-free machine translation is impossible. If you were to translate "red wine" as piros bor (instead of vörösbor) it would be ridiculous.
- deaddodo 10y ago
  Because "crimson", "magenta", "scarlet", "pink", etc are all the same color? Red isn't a color, it's a spectrum. It encompasses a whole range of colors. You use it to describe a similar set of colors when specificity isn't required ("What was that red thing?" vs "I think it would look good in crimson"), like most things in English.
  - mjlee 10y ago
    Did you read the article? The discussion is entirely about colour as a linguistic concept, not as a wavelength of reflected light. Until a few hundred years ago, pink things were simple "light red" things in English (and many other languages) - we didn't have the word pink and so couldn't express the colour without using relative terms.
    - deaddodo 10y ago
      Did you read the comment I responded to? He was stating that English speakers would use "red" interchangeably, near invariably. They don't. "Red" doesn't exist as a concept except abstractly. Words like "scarlet" and "teal" have been used since middle English to describe colors. In other words: it's not that English works the way he described (it doesn't), but instead the inverse: Hungarian doesn't have an equivalent for "red".
      - mjlee 10y ago
        That's not what they said at all. The example of red wine vs a bright red robe is a very valid one. You might become more specific when tasked with artistically describing the colour of a wine, but off the cuff you'd probably just use the word "red" for wine, blood (oxygenated or not), ink and sunsets in a way that wouldn't work in Hungarian.
      - int_19h 10y ago
        The point is that in English, there's still a common word for, say, both "scarlet" and "crimson", grouping them together. But there's no such common word between "red" and "green" - the latter are primary colors, always distinguished. In other languages, that grouping is done differently, and two colors that would both be appropriate to call "red" in English don't have a single common color term at all. To get a feel of how this looks from the other side, consider various Asian languages that don't distinguish green and blue, and have a single word that has to be translated as "green or blue" to English.
SonOfLilit 10y ago
Hebrew has "A-dom" for red, and "Bordo" (pronounced how a kid would misread a transliteration of Bordeaux, as in the red wines) for dark red. We also have "Ka-chol" ("ch" pronounced like "phlegm" in "Achmad the Dead Terrorist") for blue and "Tche-let" for light blue, which are words you learn in kindergarten and use every day (you say "sky is Tche-let", never "sky is Ka-chol". When have you last heard someone describe a mid-day summer sky in English as anything but "blue"?) Sure, we also have artist words for a thousand variations of blue: turquoise, aqua, aquamarine, etc'. In fact, just like in English, we use the French terms as is. But nobody learns them in kindergarten.

biztos 10y ago

Indeed, Piros and vörös are completely distinct, and nobody who speaks Hungarian would have any doubt what colors they indicate; and it's generally obvious when looking at a reddish color whether you're talking about piros (a brighter red, as in Red Riding Hood) or vörös (a darker red, as in Red Wine). For English speakers, in everyday usage both are just "red." English has more specific words for red but we don't use them much. This is a great example of why context-free machine translation is impossible. If you were to translate "red wine" as piros bor (instead of vörösbor) it would be ridiculous.

deaddodo 10y ago
Because "crimson", "magenta", "scarlet", "pink", etc are all the same color? Red isn't a color, it's a spectrum. It encompasses a whole range of colors. You use it to describe a similar set of colors when specificity isn't required ("What was that red thing?" vs "I think it would look good in crimson"), like most things in English.
- mjlee 10y ago
  Did you read the article? The discussion is entirely about colour as a linguistic concept, not as a wavelength of reflected light. Until a few hundred years ago, pink things were simple "light red" things in English (and many other languages) - we didn't have the word pink and so couldn't express the colour without using relative terms.
  - deaddodo 10y ago
    Did you read the comment I responded to? He was stating that English speakers would use "red" interchangeably, near invariably. They don't. "Red" doesn't exist as a concept except abstractly. Words like "scarlet" and "teal" have been used since middle English to describe colors. In other words: it's not that English works the way he described (it doesn't), but instead the inverse: Hungarian doesn't have an equivalent for "red".
    - mjlee 10y ago
      That's not what they said at all. The example of red wine vs a bright red robe is a very valid one. You might become more specific when tasked with artistically describing the colour of a wine, but off the cuff you'd probably just use the word "red" for wine, blood (oxygenated or not), ink and sunsets in a way that wouldn't work in Hungarian.
    - int_19h 10y ago
      The point is that in English, there's still a common word for, say, both "scarlet" and "crimson", grouping them together. But there's no such common word between "red" and "green" - the latter are primary colors, always distinguished. In other languages, that grouping is done differently, and two colors that would both be appropriate to call "red" in English don't have a single common color term at all. To get a feel of how this looks from the other side, consider various Asian languages that don't distinguish green and blue, and have a single word that has to be translated as "green or blue" to English.

SonOfLilit 10y ago

Hebrew has "A-dom" for red, and "Bordo" (pronounced how a kid would misread a transliteration of Bordeaux, as in the red wines) for dark red. We also have "Ka-chol" ("ch" pronounced like "phlegm" in "Achmad the Dead Terrorist") for blue and "Tche-let" for light blue, which are words you learn in kindergarten and use every day (you say "sky is Tche-let", never "sky is Ka-chol". When have you last heard someone describe a mid-day summer sky in English as anything but "blue"?) Sure, we also have artist words for a thousand variations of blue: turquoise, aqua, aquamarine, etc'. In fact, just like in English, we use the French terms as is. But nobody learns them in kindergarten.