9 ms·

Blue–Green Distinction in Language

61 points by prismatic 7y ago

dehrmann 7y ago
The more and more I learn about color, the more I learn what we're taught as children is wrong. Primary colors are arbitrary, the only reason there's three is possibly because we have three types of cones, but really to cover most of the visible spectrum. So yeah, color spaces are a thing. Cone sensitivity doesn't line up with primary colors, and some are more sensitive than others. Tetrachromacy exists in humans, so some people can see more colors. Magenta and violet are very different. Magenta isn't a real color, two colors we interpret as one. The sky is actually blue and purple. If you look hard at it you can see both, kinda like seeing RGB on a white LCD. And I'm sure there's more.
- tiglionabbit 7y ago
  My high school art teacher made us make color wheels using red, yellow, and blue paint. She showed us books that use these "primary colors" and said that this makes them more pleasing to children. I thought about it for a moment. If these are the primary colors, why aren't they what printers use? Printers use cyan, magenta, and yellow. And there's a great symmetry there, since those are all the secondary colors to light's primary red, green, and blue, which are the colors used in computer monitors. And the only thing that makes these colors primary to us is that they're the colors that the cones in our eyes perceive. So I decided to experiment. When I made my color wheel, I substituted blue for cyan and red for magenta. The color wheel I produced was much more vibrant and beautiful. There are a lot of things my school teachers tried to teach me that show up on wikipedia's common misconceptions list. For example, the "equal-transit-time explanation of aerofoil lift". I got pretty jaded about this stuff. Now I don't trust anyone's explanations unless I can understand them on a deeper level.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    > equal-transit-time explanation of aerofoil lift Seems like flying an airplane upside down disproves that explanation pretty quickly.
    - tiglionabbit 7y ago
      I remember this one distinctly because in school they just gave me a handout and asked me to come up with the explanation myself. I thought about it. I didn't know. It seemed like if you had an angle of attack then the air would hit against the bottom -- like a knife would want to continue to travel straight through a fluid. I didn't know what the significance of the curve over the top of the wing was. They tried to guide me toward the equal-transit-time explanation and I was like, uh, ok, is that really true? I remained suspicious of this for a long time.
  - braindeath 7y ago
    > If these are the primary colors, why aren't they what printers use? Printers use cyan, magenta, and yellow. There really is no such thing as "the" primary colors. The school primary colors are still primary as those used by a printer, and are based on historically widely used pigments. CMY (and usually K) allow for a wider gamut. But even this isn't perfect. There are printing processes with more primaries to get a wider gamut. > And the only thing that makes these colors primary to us is that they're the colors that the cones in our eyes perceive. This isn't quite right. For one, our cones are not monochromatic receptors, and moreover, they overlap! There isn't really just one true red, green, blue used in computer monitors either. Because of the way our brain perceives colors (metamerism), you can create a wide gamut of colors with "alternative" primaries.
    - tiglionabbit 7y ago
      What sort of alternative primaries? Just slightly-adjusted colors that still trigger each of the three cones individually?
      - braindeath 7y ago
        You can't trigger cones individually. The cones are responsive to a wide-spectrum and they overlap, especially in the case of the L and M receptors. The peak wavelength of the L receptor (the "reddest") is about 580nm -- that is not red, that's yellow-green. Color vision and stimulus is not a straightforward mapping of primaries triggering cones. If it were that simple you could trivially render all perceivable colors with 3 chosen primary colors. This is impossible to do. You can mathematically define 3 primaries that cover the entire visible spectrum but they cannot physically exist (complete, but imaginary). Any chosen set of 3 primaries is a compromise. For subtractive materials it is trickier, which is why photo inkjet printers will use up to 8 primaries. You might find this informative: https://web.archive.org/web/20080717034228/http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color6.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080717034228/http://www.handpr.... The section starting with Maxwell and the "3 artist's misconceptions" especially. But the only general definition of primary is basically just any set of colorants that can be mixed to get a useful gamut. In subtractive materials, this is why you won't see a painter messing around with mixing cyan, magenta, and yellow (better explained in the link).
  - try_again 7y ago
    Printers use cyan, magenta and yellow because printing is a subtractive process. It's the complement of the additive RGB that monitors use. For example, cyan acts as a filter for red, so a combination of magenta and yellow filters out everything but red and thus appears red. Ultimately, the difference is in whether something emits light (a monitor) or has to reflect light (a white piece of paper). You're right in that what we're taught is often incomplete or misguided. Teachers are fallible. But as a child you assume their authority implies them being correct. I reckon seeing through that illusion is an important part of growing up. And to me, part of us growing up as humanity must involve not having to rely on the authority of governing bodies.
    - tiglionabbit 7y ago
      The additive/subtractive colors thing is has a really neat sort of symmetry to it. That's how I knew it was the correct explanation. There was no such beautiful internal logic to the Red Blue Yellow system and I couldn't figure out how people came up with it. I never believed my teachers. As early as 4th grade they were treating me like a troublemaker for not following rules like their three-paragraph essay format. I don't like the idea of having authorities on knowledge. I much prefer Montessori or Socratic teaching methods, or explorations. They're harder to do, but they produce a better understanding of the material and they allow the student to teach the teacher as well.
      - braindeath 7y ago
        Yeah, unfortunately color perception is one of those things that is a bit too complex for a self-discovery method. While the "symmetry" explanation is satisfying it really isn't correct at all. Color perception and color matching within art (where it was useful) and more recently as a science is something that is complicated and took many years of the best scientific minds to figure out. Sometimes you need authorities on knowledge, and stand on the shoulders of giants as it were. https://web.archive.org/web/20080717034228/http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color6.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080717034228/http://www.handpr... The teachers aren't completely "wrong", they were just conveying a simplification of history of pigments (also touched on in that article). It is after all true you can mix those colors and get a wide-range of colors (including a blacker black then you would with CMY). But any pedagogy that says there is such a thing as "primary" colors that make all colors is necessarily going to be wrong, even if its CMY.
- mirimir 7y ago
  I'm red-green colorblind. So blue/green and green/yellow seem like more plausible categories than blue and green. I can see red, but green pretty much looks like bluish yellow.
  - bambataa 7y ago
    That’s interesting. I am also red/green colourblind and ok with red. For me though it’s more that greens and browns can be confusing.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      I have problems with anything involving green. So yes, greens and browns. Many US green signal lights look dull blue. Also with red, but less so. I can't tell some pinks from grays. And in any mixture, reddish vs greenish.
- jml7c5 7y ago
  >Magenta and violet are very different. Magenta isn't a real color, two colors we interpret as one. It's more accurate to say magenta is a color that can't be produced from a monochromatic light source. It's a mix of ~450nm and ~650nm light. It's still a color, though; the term "color" is more akin to the final output of the brain, as opposed to the light entering the eyes.
mikorym 7y ago
This is true of the whole Sotho-Tswana branch of languages. They mention it for Tswana, albeit briefly. It is also one of the reasons why English is taking over (and in less serious cases, borrowed from). English is fully developed for social, scientific, technical, complex, specialised and precise communication to an extent rivaled maybe by only a dozen other languages. On the Northern Sotho radio stations you often hear kids say, when asked about colours, "Ke ye blue" ("It is blue"). The radio presenter would sometimes correct the kid and say "Aowa, ka Sesotho re re ke ye tala." However, there is something deeper at play and something perhaps unassuming yet complex: the kid is more accurate. The value of languages like these is not the ability to convey or store technical or scientific information. But if a language disappears is like losing in one shot the whole of Beethoven's work (and a bit more than that). Sotho may have less colour words (yellow=brown too) and also it doesn't have delimiters in the sense of "far, further, furthest" (having only "far", "further", and then emphasis) but it has... verb modifiers! For example: use = to cause to work. Repair = to cause to be good. Understand = to cause to hear. Wow, am I telling you that verbs convey and encode causality in these languages? Yup, that's right.
- ak39 7y ago
  Thank you, this was a lovely explanation.
- rvense 7y ago
  > It is also one of the reasons why English is taking over (and in less serious cases, borrowed from). English is fully developed for social, scientific, technical, complex, specialised and precise communication to an extent rivaled maybe by only a dozen other languages. I don't think this would be accepted by very many linguists. Complexity and precision is a function of vocabulary, and vocabularies are easily transferred, as your own example shows. English often proves itself deficient when it is taken over by new peoples. Especially for describing the social realities of the non-English speaking world - but of course, non-native speakers will patch up these deficiencies. Finally, I am very sure that no linguist would agree that English is taking over the world because of this or that aspect of its vocabulary or the (supposed) simplicity its grammar. It is doing so because it is useful and has a high status due to social and political factors.
Areading314 7y ago
White and gold.
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  Blue and black!
legulere 7y ago
In German we nowadays have a distinction between “rosa” (light pink) and “pink” (shocking pink, some hues of fuchsia). It’s kind of funny that we got the word pink from English just in the 80s
kenhwang 7y ago
My biggest confusion learning Chinese when I was growing up was the concept of "orange". I believe orange only became part of the common vernacular fairly recently. But since Chinese words are just a combination of other words, the words for obviously orange things were using red/yellow. Now in modern usage, the color orange is named after the fruit, but the name of the orange fruit differs by region. Some places refer to oranges as tangerines, with no differentiation between oranges/tangerines, so the word for orange is actually tangerine in those regions. There's a good write up of other colors here: https://everything2.com/title/Chinese+colors https://everything2.com/title/Chinese+colors
- frobozz 7y ago
  The same is true of English. Hence people with orange hair being called redheads, and the orange-breasted Robin is called "redbreast"
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > Now in modern usage, the color orange is named after the fruit This is also true in European languages. (Including English.)
  - RmDen 7y ago
    Interestingly in dutch oranje is the color but sinaasappel is the name of fruit in dutch.
    - arexxbifs 7y ago
      There are many various descriptors for red, orange and yellow. In Italian an egg yolk is called "rosso" (red), whereas in Swedish it's called "gula" (yellow). As a side note, Orange (the fruit) is called "Apelsin" in Sweden - meaning "Apple from China", just as in Dutch. Red onions would nowadays be categorized as mostly purple, etc.
      - thaumasiotes 7y ago
zone411 7y ago
"Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages" is a fun read. It covers this blue-green distinction and a few other language curiosities.
- martopix 7y ago
  Awesome book, and one of the things I remember best about it is indeed about colours. He says historians of literature wondered whether ancient (homeric) Greeks were colourblind, since they describe the sea as "wine red"; but in fact it's just that they used "red" to describe certain dark colours. This later already changed in classical Greece.
try_again 7y ago
Does someone know if this is purely a property of languages and their evolution or if there is a biological or neurological foundation for this? I understand that you could make names for colours as fine-grained as you want with visible light being a continuous spectrum, and at the most base level there is only a concept of "colour" without further distinctions. But to me it feels like the major divisions as we know them in English are intuitive beyond language. Surely when you look at grass and the sky you feel you need different terms to describe them?
- rvense 7y ago
  > But to me it feels like the major divisions as we know them in English are intuitive beyond language. Did you perchance grow up as an English speaker, or a speaker of a language with a set of colour terms similar to English? > Surely when you look at grass and the sky you feel you need different terms to describe them Well, I'd guess that all languages have different words for sky and grass. The difference is how you relate those words to words for other things that have similar colours. There are many languages with less colour terms than English, but also some with more - and as far as I remember it's usually green and blue that have more shades, if you'll excuse the pun. Like the slice of spectrum covered by green-blue in English will be covered by more words in some languages.
- chr1 7y ago
  Do you feel like you need different terms when you look at sky, at blueberry and lapis lazully? You probably do, but do not need to distinguish them often enough to justify promoting words for them into primary colour words. Similarily its possible to have a situation when there is a single word for green and blue, and people make do with saying "grass grue" and "sky grue" in cases when they need to distinguish between them.
  - gpderetta 7y ago
    > Do you feel like you need different terms when you look at sky, at blueberry and lapis lazully? FWIW, in Italian the sky is commonly referred as 'azzurro' (azure), except when it really is a deep blue, while a blueberry would definitely be 'blu' (blue). So, yes, in Italian we tend to distinguish the two colors more than, for example, english. Which I guess is the point you are making.
Aloha 7y ago
I wonder how much the invention of azo dyes effected our perception of color and words thereof.
Animats 7y ago
"They're so different" [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2fgquYTCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2fgquYTCg
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
LatteLazy 7y ago
There are "7" colours in the rainbow because Newton said so. He said that because 7 is a biblical number and he was really really into biblical numerology.
- Aardwolf 7y ago
  Newton gave it: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet Imho, indigo and violet are the same thing (at least very close), and cyan is missing, so red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, violet would have made more sense But of course it's indeed quite possible the language shifted and it made sense in Newton's time
  - belinder 7y ago
    Imo cyan and blue are a lot closer than indigo and violet
    - Aardwolf 7y ago
      To me cyan looks blue-green, really in the middle but also significantly lighter than blue, while indigo and violet both look purple-like I'm not a native English speaker though, and as far as I know neither cyan nor indigo are commonly used in standard everyday language, but more in their own niches (printing, clothing, ...)
  - kazinator 7y ago
    The reason there is violet, by the way, is that the eye's red receptors weakly respond in that range, causing a perception of red to creep into the blue.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  I thought that was because he wanted/believed in a correspondence between colors and music, and the scale had seven main notes, A-G (the white keys on a piano). Also note that this scale is called the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_scale, which is surely not a coincidence.
Scarblac 7y ago
XKCD's Randall Munroe did a survey about color names, and the report he did on it is fantastic: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ , both informative and hilarious.
leoc 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language#/media/File:Colours_in_Irish.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction... is probably the main reason why the term for a black man in Irish Gaelic is 'fear gorm', the default literal translation of which would usually be 'blue man'. (Not a native speaker, but I had reached a decent level, many years ago now.)

61 points by prismatic 7y ago

The more and more I learn about color, the more I learn what we're taught as children is wrong. Primary colors are arbitrary, the only reason there's three is possibly because we have three types of cones, but really to cover most of the visible spectrum. So yeah, color spaces are a thing. Cone sensitivity doesn't line up with primary colors, and some are more sensitive than others. Tetrachromacy exists in humans, so some people can see more colors. Magenta and violet are very different. Magenta isn't a real color, two colors we interpret as one. The sky is actually blue and purple. If you look hard at it you can see both, kinda like seeing RGB on a white LCD. And I'm sure there's more.

tiglionabbit 7y ago
My high school art teacher made us make color wheels using red, yellow, and blue paint. She showed us books that use these "primary colors" and said that this makes them more pleasing to children. I thought about it for a moment. If these are the primary colors, why aren't they what printers use? Printers use cyan, magenta, and yellow. And there's a great symmetry there, since those are all the secondary colors to light's primary red, green, and blue, which are the colors used in computer monitors. And the only thing that makes these colors primary to us is that they're the colors that the cones in our eyes perceive. So I decided to experiment. When I made my color wheel, I substituted blue for cyan and red for magenta. The color wheel I produced was much more vibrant and beautiful. There are a lot of things my school teachers tried to teach me that show up on wikipedia's common misconceptions list. For example, the "equal-transit-time explanation of aerofoil lift". I got pretty jaded about this stuff. Now I don't trust anyone's explanations unless I can understand them on a deeper level.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  > equal-transit-time explanation of aerofoil lift Seems like flying an airplane upside down disproves that explanation pretty quickly.
  - tiglionabbit 7y ago
    I remember this one distinctly because in school they just gave me a handout and asked me to come up with the explanation myself. I thought about it. I didn't know. It seemed like if you had an angle of attack then the air would hit against the bottom -- like a knife would want to continue to travel straight through a fluid. I didn't know what the significance of the curve over the top of the wing was. They tried to guide me toward the equal-transit-time explanation and I was like, uh, ok, is that really true? I remained suspicious of this for a long time.
- braindeath 7y ago
  > If these are the primary colors, why aren't they what printers use? Printers use cyan, magenta, and yellow. There really is no such thing as "the" primary colors. The school primary colors are still primary as those used by a printer, and are based on historically widely used pigments. CMY (and usually K) allow for a wider gamut. But even this isn't perfect. There are printing processes with more primaries to get a wider gamut. > And the only thing that makes these colors primary to us is that they're the colors that the cones in our eyes perceive. This isn't quite right. For one, our cones are not monochromatic receptors, and moreover, they overlap! There isn't really just one true red, green, blue used in computer monitors either. Because of the way our brain perceives colors (metamerism), you can create a wide gamut of colors with "alternative" primaries.
  - tiglionabbit 7y ago
    What sort of alternative primaries? Just slightly-adjusted colors that still trigger each of the three cones individually?
    - braindeath 7y ago
      You can't trigger cones individually. The cones are responsive to a wide-spectrum and they overlap, especially in the case of the L and M receptors. The peak wavelength of the L receptor (the "reddest") is about 580nm -- that is not red, that's yellow-green. Color vision and stimulus is not a straightforward mapping of primaries triggering cones. If it were that simple you could trivially render all perceivable colors with 3 chosen primary colors. This is impossible to do. You can mathematically define 3 primaries that cover the entire visible spectrum but they cannot physically exist (complete, but imaginary). Any chosen set of 3 primaries is a compromise. For subtractive materials it is trickier, which is why photo inkjet printers will use up to 8 primaries. You might find this informative: https://web.archive.org/web/20080717034228/http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color6.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080717034228/http://www.handpr.... The section starting with Maxwell and the "3 artist's misconceptions" especially. But the only general definition of primary is basically just any set of colorants that can be mixed to get a useful gamut. In subtractive materials, this is why you won't see a painter messing around with mixing cyan, magenta, and yellow (better explained in the link).
- try_again 7y ago
  Printers use cyan, magenta and yellow because printing is a subtractive process. It's the complement of the additive RGB that monitors use. For example, cyan acts as a filter for red, so a combination of magenta and yellow filters out everything but red and thus appears red. Ultimately, the difference is in whether something emits light (a monitor) or has to reflect light (a white piece of paper). You're right in that what we're taught is often incomplete or misguided. Teachers are fallible. But as a child you assume their authority implies them being correct. I reckon seeing through that illusion is an important part of growing up. And to me, part of us growing up as humanity must involve not having to rely on the authority of governing bodies.
  - tiglionabbit 7y ago
    The additive/subtractive colors thing is has a really neat sort of symmetry to it. That's how I knew it was the correct explanation. There was no such beautiful internal logic to the Red Blue Yellow system and I couldn't figure out how people came up with it. I never believed my teachers. As early as 4th grade they were treating me like a troublemaker for not following rules like their three-paragraph essay format. I don't like the idea of having authorities on knowledge. I much prefer Montessori or Socratic teaching methods, or explorations. They're harder to do, but they produce a better understanding of the material and they allow the student to teach the teacher as well.
    - braindeath 7y ago
      Yeah, unfortunately color perception is one of those things that is a bit too complex for a self-discovery method. While the "symmetry" explanation is satisfying it really isn't correct at all. Color perception and color matching within art (where it was useful) and more recently as a science is something that is complicated and took many years of the best scientific minds to figure out. Sometimes you need authorities on knowledge, and stand on the shoulders of giants as it were. https://web.archive.org/web/20080717034228/http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color6.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080717034228/http://www.handpr... The teachers aren't completely "wrong", they were just conveying a simplification of history of pigments (also touched on in that article). It is after all true you can mix those colors and get a wide-range of colors (including a blacker black then you would with CMY). But any pedagogy that says there is such a thing as "primary" colors that make all colors is necessarily going to be wrong, even if its CMY.
mirimir 7y ago
I'm red-green colorblind. So blue/green and green/yellow seem like more plausible categories than blue and green. I can see red, but green pretty much looks like bluish yellow.
- bambataa 7y ago
  That’s interesting. I am also red/green colourblind and ok with red. For me though it’s more that greens and browns can be confusing.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    I have problems with anything involving green. So yes, greens and browns. Many US green signal lights look dull blue. Also with red, but less so. I can't tell some pinks from grays. And in any mixture, reddish vs greenish.
jml7c5 7y ago
>Magenta and violet are very different. Magenta isn't a real color, two colors we interpret as one. It's more accurate to say magenta is a color that can't be produced from a monochromatic light source. It's a mix of ~450nm and ~650nm light. It's still a color, though; the term "color" is more akin to the final output of the brain, as opposed to the light entering the eyes.

mikorym 7y ago

This is true of the whole Sotho-Tswana branch of languages. They mention it for Tswana, albeit briefly. It is also one of the reasons why English is taking over (and in less serious cases, borrowed from). English is fully developed for social, scientific, technical, complex, specialised and precise communication to an extent rivaled maybe by only a dozen other languages. On the Northern Sotho radio stations you often hear kids say, when asked about colours, "Ke ye blue" ("It is blue"). The radio presenter would sometimes correct the kid and say "Aowa, ka Sesotho re re ke ye tala." However, there is something deeper at play and something perhaps unassuming yet complex: the kid is more accurate. The value of languages like these is not the ability to convey or store technical or scientific information. But if a language disappears is like losing in one shot the whole of Beethoven's work (and a bit more than that). Sotho may have less colour words (yellow=brown too) and also it doesn't have delimiters in the sense of "far, further, furthest" (having only "far", "further", and then emphasis) but it has... verb modifiers! For example: use = to cause to work. Repair = to cause to be good. Understand = to cause to hear. Wow, am I telling you that verbs convey and encode causality in these languages? Yup, that's right.

ak39 7y ago
Thank you, this was a lovely explanation.
rvense 7y ago
> It is also one of the reasons why English is taking over (and in less serious cases, borrowed from). English is fully developed for social, scientific, technical, complex, specialised and precise communication to an extent rivaled maybe by only a dozen other languages. I don't think this would be accepted by very many linguists. Complexity and precision is a function of vocabulary, and vocabularies are easily transferred, as your own example shows. English often proves itself deficient when it is taken over by new peoples. Especially for describing the social realities of the non-English speaking world - but of course, non-native speakers will patch up these deficiencies. Finally, I am very sure that no linguist would agree that English is taking over the world because of this or that aspect of its vocabulary or the (supposed) simplicity its grammar. It is doing so because it is useful and has a high status due to social and political factors.

Areading314 7y ago

White and gold.

henrikschroder 7y ago
Blue and black!

legulere 7y ago

In German we nowadays have a distinction between “rosa” (light pink) and “pink” (shocking pink, some hues of fuchsia). It’s kind of funny that we got the word pink from English just in the 80s

kenhwang 7y ago

My biggest confusion learning Chinese when I was growing up was the concept of "orange". I believe orange only became part of the common vernacular fairly recently. But since Chinese words are just a combination of other words, the words for obviously orange things were using red/yellow. Now in modern usage, the color orange is named after the fruit, but the name of the orange fruit differs by region. Some places refer to oranges as tangerines, with no differentiation between oranges/tangerines, so the word for orange is actually tangerine in those regions. There's a good write up of other colors here: https://everything2.com/title/Chinese+colors https://everything2.com/title/Chinese+colors

frobozz 7y ago
The same is true of English. Hence people with orange hair being called redheads, and the orange-breasted Robin is called "redbreast"
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> Now in modern usage, the color orange is named after the fruit This is also true in European languages. (Including English.)
- RmDen 7y ago
  Interestingly in dutch oranje is the color but sinaasappel is the name of fruit in dutch.
  - arexxbifs 7y ago
    There are many various descriptors for red, orange and yellow. In Italian an egg yolk is called "rosso" (red), whereas in Swedish it's called "gula" (yellow). As a side note, Orange (the fruit) is called "Apelsin" in Sweden - meaning "Apple from China", just as in Dutch. Red onions would nowadays be categorized as mostly purple, etc.
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago

zone411 7y ago

"Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages" is a fun read. It covers this blue-green distinction and a few other language curiosities.

martopix 7y ago
Awesome book, and one of the things I remember best about it is indeed about colours. He says historians of literature wondered whether ancient (homeric) Greeks were colourblind, since they describe the sea as "wine red"; but in fact it's just that they used "red" to describe certain dark colours. This later already changed in classical Greece.

try_again 7y ago

Does someone know if this is purely a property of languages and their evolution or if there is a biological or neurological foundation for this? I understand that you could make names for colours as fine-grained as you want with visible light being a continuous spectrum, and at the most base level there is only a concept of "colour" without further distinctions. But to me it feels like the major divisions as we know them in English are intuitive beyond language. Surely when you look at grass and the sky you feel you need different terms to describe them?

rvense 7y ago
> But to me it feels like the major divisions as we know them in English are intuitive beyond language. Did you perchance grow up as an English speaker, or a speaker of a language with a set of colour terms similar to English? > Surely when you look at grass and the sky you feel you need different terms to describe them Well, I'd guess that all languages have different words for sky and grass. The difference is how you relate those words to words for other things that have similar colours. There are many languages with less colour terms than English, but also some with more - and as far as I remember it's usually green and blue that have more shades, if you'll excuse the pun. Like the slice of spectrum covered by green-blue in English will be covered by more words in some languages.
chr1 7y ago
Do you feel like you need different terms when you look at sky, at blueberry and lapis lazully? You probably do, but do not need to distinguish them often enough to justify promoting words for them into primary colour words. Similarily its possible to have a situation when there is a single word for green and blue, and people make do with saying "grass grue" and "sky grue" in cases when they need to distinguish between them.
- gpderetta 7y ago
  > Do you feel like you need different terms when you look at sky, at blueberry and lapis lazully? FWIW, in Italian the sky is commonly referred as 'azzurro' (azure), except when it really is a deep blue, while a blueberry would definitely be 'blu' (blue). So, yes, in Italian we tend to distinguish the two colors more than, for example, english. Which I guess is the point you are making.

Aloha 7y ago

I wonder how much the invention of azo dyes effected our perception of color and words thereof.

Animats 7y ago

"They're so different" [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2fgquYTCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2fgquYTCg

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

LatteLazy 7y ago

There are "7" colours in the rainbow because Newton said so. He said that because 7 is a biblical number and he was really really into biblical numerology.

Aardwolf 7y ago
Newton gave it: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet Imho, indigo and violet are the same thing (at least very close), and cyan is missing, so red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, violet would have made more sense But of course it's indeed quite possible the language shifted and it made sense in Newton's time
- belinder 7y ago
  Imo cyan and blue are a lot closer than indigo and violet
  - Aardwolf 7y ago
    To me cyan looks blue-green, really in the middle but also significantly lighter than blue, while indigo and violet both look purple-like I'm not a native English speaker though, and as far as I know neither cyan nor indigo are commonly used in standard everyday language, but more in their own niches (printing, clothing, ...)
- kazinator 7y ago
  The reason there is violet, by the way, is that the eye's red receptors weakly respond in that range, causing a perception of red to creep into the blue.
bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
I thought that was because he wanted/believed in a correspondence between colors and music, and the scale had seven main notes, A-G (the white keys on a piano). Also note that this scale is called the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_scale, which is surely not a coincidence.

Scarblac 7y ago

XKCD's Randall Munroe did a survey about color names, and the report he did on it is fantastic: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ , both informative and hilarious.

leoc 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language#/media/File:Colours_in_Irish.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction... is probably the main reason why the term for a black man in Irish Gaelic is 'fear gorm', the default literal translation of which would usually be 'blue man'. (Not a native speaker, but I had reached a decent level, many years ago now.)