3 ms·

That definition seems arbitrary and debatable. For instance, what is high frequency? And what if say blind speakers of the language disagree?

by Teever 10y ago

jedberg 10y ago
> For instance, what is high frequency? The 300 most frequent words in a representative corpus of text. > And what if say blind speakers of the language disagree? Blind speakers represent a small portion of all speakers, so even if every one of them disagrees, the majority of speakers will still agree.
- CWuestefeld 10y ago
  The 300 most frequent words in a representative corpus of text. That doesn't seem to be a very good definition. As we subdivide colors into greater specificity, it'll naturally occur that each subdivision is referenced fewer times. So this definition intrinsically precludes a discovery of finer distinctions. IMHO, the whole idea that language shapes thought and perception (see TFA reference to Whorf) is overblown. I've seen this refuted where one person made the claim that while Nepalese(?) has a term for "mountain peak", English has no such word. The reply was: "of course it has a term for this: 'mountain peak'". As expert language users, we have no trouble synthesizing new concepts by using our language, which after all is far more than just a list of words, to frame our thoughts. I once was sitting near an argument about whether an object was blue or purple, and they decided to drag me into the argument. Not wanting to take sides, I said "how about periwinkle?", and they both seemed satisfied with that answer.
  - jedberg 10y ago
    > it'll naturally occur that each subdivision is referenced fewer times. That's true but their relative frequency will not change. Ie. if your only words are warm and cold you may see each of those 6% of the time, but if your have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple then you will see each one 2% of the time. But in both cases all the other color related words in the language would be significantly less than 2%.
    - CWuestefeld 10y ago
      To test this I went to google and did searches for the basic 11 colors, and a couple of others, noting the number of hits found. The big 11: red 12,110,000,000 orange 7,040,000,000 yellow 6,370,000,000 green 13,850,000,000 blue 15,100,000,000 purple 10,160,000,000 black 13,390,000,000 white 12,330,000,000 gray 14,950,000,000 brown 10,160,000,000 pink 4,700,000,000 ... and some test cases maroon 152,000,000 teal 7,320,000,000 navy 870,000,000 cyan 110,000,000 I think the frequency explanation has trouble, since "teal" has more hits than "orange", "yellow", and (by a lot) "pink".
      - jedberg 10y ago
        Google is not a corpus of text. Usually you remove proper nouns when doing a word frequency analysis. Pink, Maroon and Navy are all proper nouns -- Singer/songwriter, band (Maroon 5), and branch of the military. Also, a Google search only gets you documents that have that word at least once, but removes duplicates. So maybe the page with red has it listed 7,000 times but you wouldn't know. Trying using all the text in Project Gutenberg[0], removing the proper nouns, and then run the analysis again. Linguists have done this for you already -- and the results were that your top list are in the top 300 and the bottom are not. [0]https://www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- Teever 10y ago
  Why not 325? Or 350? Or 400?
  - jedberg 10y ago
    Because past 300 it very dependent on the specific corpus, so linguists have settled on 300 since just about any corpus gives the same top 300.
int_19h 10y ago
I don't really know how to explain it, but trust me as a native Russian speaker: in Russian, the felt difference between "light blue" (a more accurate translation might be "azure" or "sky blue", as that is considered the archetypical manifestation of it) and "dark blue" is the same as between "blue" and "green" in English. Now, as a native English speaker, do you feel that "blue" vs "green" is the same difference as "blue" vs "azure"? I'd wager that even if you can't quite verbalize it, you can feel it.
- contravariant 10y ago
  I suppose one of the clearest ways to demonstrate is to note that it's perfectly all right to describe something as a 'greenish blue' but you never hear someone talking about an 'azurish green'.

That definition seems arbitrary and debatable. For instance, what is high frequency? And what if say blind speakers of the language disagree?

by Teever 10y ago

That definition seems arbitrary and debatable. For instance, what is high frequency? And what if say blind speakers of the language disagree?

jedberg 10y ago

> For instance, what is high frequency? The 300 most frequent words in a representative corpus of text. > And what if say blind speakers of the language disagree? Blind speakers represent a small portion of all speakers, so even if every one of them disagrees, the majority of speakers will still agree.

CWuestefeld 10y ago
The 300 most frequent words in a representative corpus of text. That doesn't seem to be a very good definition. As we subdivide colors into greater specificity, it'll naturally occur that each subdivision is referenced fewer times. So this definition intrinsically precludes a discovery of finer distinctions. IMHO, the whole idea that language shapes thought and perception (see TFA reference to Whorf) is overblown. I've seen this refuted where one person made the claim that while Nepalese(?) has a term for "mountain peak", English has no such word. The reply was: "of course it has a term for this: 'mountain peak'". As expert language users, we have no trouble synthesizing new concepts by using our language, which after all is far more than just a list of words, to frame our thoughts. I once was sitting near an argument about whether an object was blue or purple, and they decided to drag me into the argument. Not wanting to take sides, I said "how about periwinkle?", and they both seemed satisfied with that answer.
- jedberg 10y ago
  > it'll naturally occur that each subdivision is referenced fewer times. That's true but their relative frequency will not change. Ie. if your only words are warm and cold you may see each of those 6% of the time, but if your have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple then you will see each one 2% of the time. But in both cases all the other color related words in the language would be significantly less than 2%.
  - CWuestefeld 10y ago
    To test this I went to google and did searches for the basic 11 colors, and a couple of others, noting the number of hits found. The big 11: red 12,110,000,000 orange 7,040,000,000 yellow 6,370,000,000 green 13,850,000,000 blue 15,100,000,000 purple 10,160,000,000 black 13,390,000,000 white 12,330,000,000 gray 14,950,000,000 brown 10,160,000,000 pink 4,700,000,000 ... and some test cases maroon 152,000,000 teal 7,320,000,000 navy 870,000,000 cyan 110,000,000 I think the frequency explanation has trouble, since "teal" has more hits than "orange", "yellow", and (by a lot) "pink".
    - jedberg 10y ago
      Google is not a corpus of text. Usually you remove proper nouns when doing a word frequency analysis. Pink, Maroon and Navy are all proper nouns -- Singer/songwriter, band (Maroon 5), and branch of the military. Also, a Google search only gets you documents that have that word at least once, but removes duplicates. So maybe the page with red has it listed 7,000 times but you wouldn't know. Trying using all the text in Project Gutenberg[0], removing the proper nouns, and then run the analysis again. Linguists have done this for you already -- and the results were that your top list are in the top 300 and the bottom are not. [0]https://www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Teever 10y ago
Why not 325? Or 350? Or 400?
- jedberg 10y ago
  Because past 300 it very dependent on the specific corpus, so linguists have settled on 300 since just about any corpus gives the same top 300.

int_19h 10y ago

I don't really know how to explain it, but trust me as a native Russian speaker: in Russian, the felt difference between "light blue" (a more accurate translation might be "azure" or "sky blue", as that is considered the archetypical manifestation of it) and "dark blue" is the same as between "blue" and "green" in English. Now, as a native English speaker, do you feel that "blue" vs "green" is the same difference as "blue" vs "azure"? I'd wager that even if you can't quite verbalize it, you can feel it.

contravariant 10y ago
I suppose one of the clearest ways to demonstrate is to note that it's perfectly all right to describe something as a 'greenish blue' but you never hear someone talking about an 'azurish green'.