10 ms·
New theory why languages don’t all have the same number of terms for colors
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cetalingua 9y agoAnother fascinating topic is how our language determines how we see different colors. The Himba tribe does not distinguish between blue and green, but is able to discriminate among shades of green that basically look the same to us, Westerners. https://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/its-not-easy-seeing-green/ https://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/its-not-easy-s...
- SilasX 9y agoHuh? I just ran a color picker over the squares in the article's pic [1]. They're all RGB 0/199-200/0 except for a left mid-upper one, which is 0/206/0 ... is that what sticks out to this tribe? Then I follow the link to the original [2] chart, which claims RGB values of 80/186/15, except for the odd one which is 97/192/4. But my color picker is showing the same as before: everything is 0/199-206/0. Something is not right here. Edit: Here are the two colors he intended, based on the labeling of [2]. I can tell them apart. https://www.webpagefx.com/web-design/color-picker/50BA0F https://www.webpagefx.com/web-design/color-picker/50BA0F https://www.webpagefx.com/web-design/color-picker/61C004 https://www.webpagefx.com/web-design/color-picker/61C004 [1] In Mac OS X you can pull up the "digital color picker" from spotlight search. [2] had to to change to http from https ... should be safe for this context: http://origin.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ring1-RGB.jpg http://origin.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ring...
- DiabloD3 9y agoThis is why this has always been confusing to me. Those aren't the same colors. They're both greens, but different in both exact hue and in brightness. This has nothing to do with words, but with the precision of the human eyeball.
- norgie 9y agoThat is the experiment. All the boxes are the same color except for one (the oddball), which the subject is supposed to identify. The original study claimed that the Himba were (slightly?) faster to pick the oddball when it was a slightly different shade of green than UK English speakers. When the oddball was blue, UK English speakers were faster than the Himba.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoNot to mention the...unusual choice of highly-compressed-JPG for an image containing only solid blocks of similar colors.
- admiralpumpkin 9y ago"Digital Color Meter" in my version of macOS.
- HanayamaTriplet 9y agoThat reporting is completely factually incorrect [1]. There is no evidence that the tribes are unable to distinguish colors or are able to see colors that other people can't. [1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18237 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18237
- cetalingua 9y agoActually, this statement is not factually correct either. While there might be a debate about Himba tribe and colors, there are other tribes like Karajá and Waorani, as they both are counterexamples to universals of color naming, which could imply a possibility of perceptual differences as well ( see Regier et al., 2009) http://muse.jhu.edu/article/369843 http://muse.jhu.edu/article/369843
- mehwoot 9y agocould imply a possibility of perceptual differences isn't quite the same as is able to discriminate among shades of green that basically look the same to us
- cetalingua 9y agoIf you read the paper cited you will see it is even more dramatic than that: "Thus, the color-naming system of Waorani, like that of Karajá, does not fit the structure of perceptual color space. Although neither Waorani nor Karajá has been regularly held up as a counterexample to universals of color naming, they both are genuine counterexamples" Also, from the actual Himba study (by the way,the study was conducted and published) "Himba participants show categorical perception only for their own linguistic categories and not for either the supposed universal categories of English" Roberson et al., 2005 (full citation in another comment)
- bcgraham 9y agoThat probably never happened. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970
- cetalingua 9y agoFrom the actual study: "Himba participants show categorical perception only for their own linguistic categories and not for either the supposed universal categories of English" Roberson, D., Davidoff, J., Davies, I. R., & Shapiro, L. R. (2005). Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis. Cognitive psychology, 50(4), 378-411. On top of that there is also Berinmo tribe that " marks a color boundary that is absent in English (i.e., a boundary within the English green category), but also fails to mark other boundaries that are found in English (e.g. the boundary between blue and purple (Roberson, Davidoff, Davies, & Shapiro, 2005)"
- FabHK 9y agoThere's a good book about this whole complex of themes, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis [1] that basically your language determines the way you think (100 words for snow, more/fewer words for colours, etc.): Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher. TL;DR: no, language doesn't determine how you see the world. There might be one notable exception - there's a tribe somewhere (forgot the details) that doesn't use front, behind, left, right, but the cardinal directions (they'll actually say, "oh, there's an ant on your northern leg"). As they grow up with this, they have an uncanny sense of where north is wherever they are, even in buildings etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
- Osmium 9y agoJust to really emphasize the point -- the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been essentially disproved. It comes up a lot because it's a very attractive idea, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. > that doesn't use front, behind, left, right, but the cardinal directions I can't remember where I saw this (maybe Language Log, consider this "citation needed"), but apparently there are some Polynesian Islanders that use a language with different direction concepts (inwards/outwards maybe?).
- TallGuyShort 9y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but I think your comment is saying the hypothesis itself has been disproved, and the parent is referring to a book about the hypothesis with the same name that emphasizes criticisms of that hypothesis. Right?
- Osmium 9y agoI haven't read the book the parent mentioned, I'm not sure what the book contains. But I agree with the parent's "TL;DR: no, language doesn't determine how you see the world." There is a lot of literature on Sapir-Whorf, including many pop linguistics books. Note I'm not a linguist, I just know a few and they're very vocal about this :)
- bsder 9y agoNoting subtle differences in "warm" colors probably corresponds to ability to determine if food is ripe or spoiled. If it's various shades of "green", it's all unripe so you don't care.
- maxwell 9y agoAlso, warning coloration in animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aposematism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aposematism And perhaps connections with toxicity in fungi (i.e. Amanita muscaria) and plants (e.g. European yew and bittersweet nightshade).
- DonaldFisk 9y agoThe aril (i.e. the red seed covering) is the only part of the yew tree which isn't poisonous.
- microcolonel 9y ago> the grid itself is perceptually more or less uniform I can tell you that the grid is more physically uniform than perceptually uniform. It is well known that humans are physiologically less capable of distinguishing hues of blue than of most other broad categories. This property is encoded in most colorimetric systems, such as CIEDE 2000. Update: I read a paper some years ago which I can no longer find an English copy of[0]. The author used Isomap to project the mutual perceptual distances (as modeled by CIEDE 2000) of physically-uniform colors onto a two and three dimensional euclidean space, with very interesting results (toward the end of the PDF). [0]: https://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/22445/22445.PDF https://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/22445/22445.PDF
- sporkologist 9y agoIt may be that blue is pervasive, at least in blue-skyed cultures, such that any variations in blue are not that important for tasks such as finding ripe fruits or rancid meats. So then, maybe blue was relegated to the background of consciousness as being unremarkable in itself.
- microcolonel 9y agoBlue is generally pretty useless, very few natural things are blue in terms of diffuse/albedo hue. I'd accept an assertion that it is largely useless for an animal to distinguish between blue band wavelengths.
- iainmerrick 9y agoI can tell you that the grid is more physically uniform than perceptually uniform. If they're Munsell colors, as the article suggests, they should be close to perceptually uniform. The Munsell system was specifically designed around perceptible color differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system It's pretty old, so it predates any of the modern standardized color systems you'd typically use in software today.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- maxwell 9y agoJust watched this Vox video on a (potential) pattern behind color names last week, which also covers a bit about the research by Berlin and Kay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg
- interfixus 9y ago> In an industrialized culture, most people get by with 11 color words: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple and gray Native Danish speaker, and I really only acknowledge eight true colours: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, and gray. Perhaps tellingly, all those that come with solid, earthy, Germanic names. Orange and purple are clearly much later imports, and while I do of course use the words, I cannot help regarding those two as constructs - blends of yellow/red and blue/red. Pink is such a recent import, it has only really become a term in my lifetime. It is not a word I would normally use, except in a sort of ironic context. I would always default to "light red". My no nonsense daughter, in her twenties, insists that pink is definitely its own colour - not the same as light red. But then, as I understand it, female eyes can see further along the infrared spectrum than male ones. I assume women have a richer perception of most things reddish than the rest of us.
- abakker 9y agoFWIW, Pink is a non-spectral color - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_color#Non-spectral_colors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_color#Non-spectral_co... That might be what you are getting after in your discussion.
- jjoonathan 9y agoPink/magenta comes from stimulating S (blue) and L (red) receptors simultaneously while not stimulating M (green). It's actually rather unique in that respect. It's the "glue" your brain uses to paste the red and blue ends of the spectrum together, because the visible electromagnetic spectrum has two edges (blue and red, high and low frequency respectively) while the perception of hue does not (see: color wheel). The only color you won't find on a rainbow, so to speak. If you say "I can make magenta by mixing white and red light," I'll come back and say "OK, what do you call the color you get when you subsequently filter out green?"
- TorKlingberg 9y agoI do wonder why light red feels like a distinct color (pink), while light blue or green does not. Is it just a learned cultural thing?
- jknz 9y agoTraffic lights are green/yellow/red in the US. They are rouge/orange/rouge in French (translation: green/orange/red). Some languages perceive the middle color as yellow, some as orange. Because this is deeply buried in the brain since childhood, adult friends from different countries can disagree on the true color of the middle light for ages... I am wondering if this difference can lead to different taste/connotation regarding colors in different country.
- morinted 9y agoI've heard the center light referred to as "amber".
- bhrgunatha 9y agoIn the UK it's Amber. I can't remember ever hearing yellow.
- unholiness 9y agoIn the UK it's actually a different color though. Their center lights are a light orange that, as an American, I wouldn't hesitate to call amber.
- jknz 9y agoMy mistake. Actually it is Spanish and French that use different colors for the middle light -- not English. The middle light is "amarillo" (yellow) in spanish, while it's "orange" in French.
- grzm 9y ago> They are rouge/orange/rouge in French (translation: green/orange/red). My French is nonexistent, but there's a typo here, right? Should that be vert/orange/rouge?
- DonaldFisk 9y agoA case of red-green colour blindness? It should indeed be vert/orange/rouge
- jlebrech 9y agoI could be related to how far north or how close to the equator the language started, hue and contrast will vary based on light. If something is dark green in the morning but light green at noon, you'll just call it green.
- woodmaniac 9y agoHmm. This helps explain to me the weird notion that some people are “white” and others are “black”, when neither is either. Addendum: The new ones that were found that weren’t white or black were obviously... red.