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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

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
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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]