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Our Language Affects What We See: A new look at “the Russian blues”
- danboarder 5y ago"While English has a single word for blue, Russian has two words, goluboy for light blue and siniy for dark blue. These are considered "basic level" terms, like green and purple, since no adjective is needed to distinguish them." So Russians see two different colors within the colors space that we English speakers identify as just blue, or perhaps 'shades of blue'. Imagine if we didn't have two words for Purple and Blue, we just called them shades of Purple. Then when we saw the sky we would just say it is "sky purple" for example. From the article, the tests show that Russians could identify the different blue colors faster than non-Russian speakers based on how the way they see the world is integrated with their language classification. Fascinating.
- ksaj 5y agoSomething related at least: we have indigo. Some people consider it a specific colour. Others just think it is just purple. Even harder is agreeing on when purple becomes indigo.