3 ms·

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 a

by 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.

3 ms·

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 a

by mjlee 10y ago

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.