6 ms·

Completely different languages tend to group colors in roughly the same way

54 points by nelsondev 5y ago

retrac 5y ago
Fascinating. This builds on previous work in this area. There seems to be a hierarchy of distinction. Every language distinguishes black/white. Nearly every culture had bright red as a distinct colour term. yellow/blue/green usually too. Some distinguish blue/green clearly others have a default aquamarine and specifying "blue" or "green" is kind of like when we specify "navy blue" or "sky blue". (Light and dark blue are distinct basic colours for Russians.) The article mentions this being around for a couple decades, but it's much further back than that. The groundwork was laid in the 1960s and even earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Universality_and_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Unive... No single hypothesis on why. Is it innate to our cognition and our vision system? Or is it just a cultural trait, practically arising out of things like that red fruit are tasty so we talk about them a lot?
- rendall 5y ago
  What I find most fascinating about Basic Color Terms is the regularity across cultures, worldviews and languages. If a language has 2 terms for color, they are always "light" and "dark". If it has 3 terms for color, the third term is always "red". If it has 4 terms for color, the fourth term is always "yellow" or "green". 5 terms, the language has both "yellow" and "green".
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    Yes, interesting. A lot of fruit is red and people see red, so there seems to be some link there. Many animals do not see red. Foliage is green (leafy plants), or maybe yellow (dried grasses) depending on area.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Or the red is for tracking the blood of a bleeding hunted animal. We don't have the nose so we'd have to do it by sight.
  - DFHippie 5y ago
    I find it interesting that the last terms in the hierarchy are pastels. If you have one basic pastel, it's grey. Two: you have grey and pink. Three: grey, pink, and robin's egg blue. Pastel brown, purple, and green are easy for the human eye to distinguish (yellow and orange less so), but they never make the cut. Actually, I speaking a bit off the cuff. I don't recall where grey is in the hierarchy -- it's towards the end -- but the last two are pink and pastel blue.
  - chrismcb 5y ago
    Is it"always" it is it "usually" I thought there were a few exceptions to this grouping.
- _moof 5y ago
  There's some apparent overlap here with the perceptual research I learned about when I did my cartography degree. When selecting colors for a map depicting a single continuous variable, red is universally perceived as "more." Almost any other color will have cultural significance that is highly variable.
- hihihihi1234 5y ago
  > others have a default aquamarine and specifying "blue" or "green" is kind of like when we specify "navy blue" or "sky blue" One specific example: the Vietnamese word "xanh" means "blue or green". If you want to be specific, you say (the equivalent of) "sky xanh" or "leaf xanh".
  - dustintrex 5y ago
    This comes from Chinese, where 青 can be both green or blue. Modern Chinese uses 绿 and 蓝 instead to distinguish the two, but Japan continues to use 青 ambiguously: eg aoshingō "blue traffic light" for what we would call a green light. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92
    - fenomas 5y ago
      Ao isn't ambiguous in modern Japanese. It appears in various set phrases for things that aren't blue, but when used on its own to describe the color of something it just means blue.
    - hihihihi1234 5y ago
      I'm not sure the Vietnamese word comes from Chinese, even if the meaning is the same. Your link says that the Vietnamese word that's a cognate of the Chinese one is thanh not xanh. Vietnamese is from a completely different language family to Chinese, although it's been influenced by Chinese over the centuries.
      - dustintrex 5y ago
        Xanh is also a cognate of the same character: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xanh https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xanh
        hihihihi1234 5y ago
        I stand corrected.
- Jensson 5y ago
  I guess they associated colors with object classes. Animals are red and plants are green. Some plants are also blue, like flowers, so blue is also a plant color, so if you have one word for plant color you get blue and green as the same. Not sure about yellow, is it associated with fire maybe?
- angelzen 5y ago
  > No single hypothesis on why. No utility. Blue objects in the world: the sky, the sea, a handful of flowers, some very rare stones. Not edible, not usable in any other form. The phenomenon can be directly observed in some languages where 'green' is synonymous with 'unripe'. Highly likely that the 'unripe' sense evolved first.
  - ilammy 5y ago
    Also, the people most likely to discuss colors are artists and such. The thing with blue is that for a very long time pure blue pigments like aquamarine were extremely rare and expensive, quite likely non-existent at all in the times of basic vocabulary formation and associated development. You don't give names and fine distinctions to things you don't deal with often.
kens 5y ago
I had a paper in the Journal of Irreproducible Results many years ago that explained how languages developed Basic Color Terms to help sort laundry. I'm on my phone so I can't get a better link than this other: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.54.422%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&ved=2ahUKEwjf9I2M0KzzAhWyOn0KHdljCS8QFnoECAQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2L6WaUEid0fvlNwyQa2mhH https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
molly0 5y ago
I remember reading Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte. It had some interesting insights into how humans categorize different things by colors and how that can be used when building info graphs.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
There's common physiology for human colour perception: rods for brightness, cones for red-green-blue. Atop this are opponent colours: black-white, red-green, blue-yellow.
- i_like_apis 5y ago
  Right. Finding a difference in color language would be more surprising. At least it's good to know for certain.
- nelsondev 5y ago
  The cones respond to multiple wavelengths, so it can not be so neatly discretized into “red-green-blue”. It’s more “red/orange/yellow-green-blue/purple”. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.html#c1 http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.htm...
hyperpallium2 5y ago
> Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. - DNA
andrewzah 5y ago
John McWhorter on Lexicon Valley has a great episode about this phenomenon. https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/09/john-mcwhorter-on-the-english-color-words.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/09/john-mcwhorter-on-t...

54 points by nelsondev 5y ago

Fascinating. This builds on previous work in this area. There seems to be a hierarchy of distinction. Every language distinguishes black/white. Nearly every culture had bright red as a distinct colour term. yellow/blue/green usually too. Some distinguish blue/green clearly others have a default aquamarine and specifying "blue" or "green" is kind of like when we specify "navy blue" or "sky blue". (Light and dark blue are distinct basic colours for Russians.) The article mentions this being around for a couple decades, but it's much further back than that. The groundwork was laid in the 1960s and even earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Universality_and_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Unive... No single hypothesis on why. Is it innate to our cognition and our vision system? Or is it just a cultural trait, practically arising out of things like that red fruit are tasty so we talk about them a lot?

rendall 5y ago
What I find most fascinating about Basic Color Terms is the regularity across cultures, worldviews and languages. If a language has 2 terms for color, they are always "light" and "dark". If it has 3 terms for color, the third term is always "red". If it has 4 terms for color, the fourth term is always "yellow" or "green". 5 terms, the language has both "yellow" and "green".
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  Yes, interesting. A lot of fruit is red and people see red, so there seems to be some link there. Many animals do not see red. Foliage is green (leafy plants), or maybe yellow (dried grasses) depending on area.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Or the red is for tracking the blood of a bleeding hunted animal. We don't have the nose so we'd have to do it by sight.
- DFHippie 5y ago
  I find it interesting that the last terms in the hierarchy are pastels. If you have one basic pastel, it's grey. Two: you have grey and pink. Three: grey, pink, and robin's egg blue. Pastel brown, purple, and green are easy for the human eye to distinguish (yellow and orange less so), but they never make the cut. Actually, I speaking a bit off the cuff. I don't recall where grey is in the hierarchy -- it's towards the end -- but the last two are pink and pastel blue.
- chrismcb 5y ago
  Is it"always" it is it "usually" I thought there were a few exceptions to this grouping.
_moof 5y ago
There's some apparent overlap here with the perceptual research I learned about when I did my cartography degree. When selecting colors for a map depicting a single continuous variable, red is universally perceived as "more." Almost any other color will have cultural significance that is highly variable.
hihihihi1234 5y ago
> others have a default aquamarine and specifying "blue" or "green" is kind of like when we specify "navy blue" or "sky blue" One specific example: the Vietnamese word "xanh" means "blue or green". If you want to be specific, you say (the equivalent of) "sky xanh" or "leaf xanh".
- dustintrex 5y ago
  This comes from Chinese, where 青 can be both green or blue. Modern Chinese uses 绿 and 蓝 instead to distinguish the two, but Japan continues to use 青 ambiguously: eg aoshingō "blue traffic light" for what we would call a green light. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92
  - fenomas 5y ago
    Ao isn't ambiguous in modern Japanese. It appears in various set phrases for things that aren't blue, but when used on its own to describe the color of something it just means blue.
  - hihihihi1234 5y ago
    I'm not sure the Vietnamese word comes from Chinese, even if the meaning is the same. Your link says that the Vietnamese word that's a cognate of the Chinese one is thanh not xanh. Vietnamese is from a completely different language family to Chinese, although it's been influenced by Chinese over the centuries.
    - dustintrex 5y ago
      Xanh is also a cognate of the same character: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xanh https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xanh
      - hihihihi1234 5y ago
        I stand corrected.
Jensson 5y ago
I guess they associated colors with object classes. Animals are red and plants are green. Some plants are also blue, like flowers, so blue is also a plant color, so if you have one word for plant color you get blue and green as the same. Not sure about yellow, is it associated with fire maybe?
angelzen 5y ago
> No single hypothesis on why. No utility. Blue objects in the world: the sky, the sea, a handful of flowers, some very rare stones. Not edible, not usable in any other form. The phenomenon can be directly observed in some languages where 'green' is synonymous with 'unripe'. Highly likely that the 'unripe' sense evolved first.
- ilammy 5y ago
  Also, the people most likely to discuss colors are artists and such. The thing with blue is that for a very long time pure blue pigments like aquamarine were extremely rare and expensive, quite likely non-existent at all in the times of basic vocabulary formation and associated development. You don't give names and fine distinctions to things you don't deal with often.

kens 5y ago

I had a paper in the Journal of Irreproducible Results many years ago that explained how languages developed Basic Color Terms to help sort laundry. I'm on my phone so I can't get a better link than this other: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.54.422%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&ved=2ahUKEwjf9I2M0KzzAhWyOn0KHdljCS8QFnoECAQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2L6WaUEid0fvlNwyQa2mhH https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

molly0 5y ago

I remember reading Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte. It had some interesting insights into how humans categorize different things by colors and how that can be used when building info graphs.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

There's common physiology for human colour perception: rods for brightness, cones for red-green-blue. Atop this are opponent colours: black-white, red-green, blue-yellow.

i_like_apis 5y ago
Right. Finding a difference in color language would be more surprising. At least it's good to know for certain.
nelsondev 5y ago
The cones respond to multiple wavelengths, so it can not be so neatly discretized into “red-green-blue”. It’s more “red/orange/yellow-green-blue/purple”. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.html#c1 http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.htm...

hyperpallium2 5y ago

> Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. - DNA

andrewzah 5y ago

John McWhorter on Lexicon Valley has a great episode about this phenomenon. https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/09/john-mcwhorter-on-the-english-color-words.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/09/john-mcwhorter-on-t...