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A good deal of confusion in topics like this comes from assuming that not having vocabulary to describe differences means that people weren't aware of the diffe

by wrp 2y ago

A good deal of confusion in topics like this comes from assuming that not having vocabulary to describe differences means that people weren't aware of the differences. That's silly. Have you ever tried to pick a paint for your house and had to choose between a hundred variations of the basic color you wanted? Even without specialist color vocabulary, you could perceive the differences. Anthropologists have found tribal societies whose number vocabulary included only One, Two, Three, and Many. Do you think they couldn't tell the difference between having 5 or 10 cows? There have also been some languages with very few color words. In fact, there is known a rule that if a language has only three color words, they will be White, Black, and Red.

dullcrisp 2y ago
You could perceive the difference, but then you go home with a swatch of the color instead of just remembering what color it was.
- jacobolus 2y ago
  Someone with a bit of practice with the Munsell system can remember the difference between, say, 2.5 BG 4/8 and 5 BG 6/6 (the latter is slightly more blue, a bit lighter, and not as saturated), and can both accurately judge the color coordinates on sight and imagine what color some coordinates will represent. But both are just going to be called "teal" or "blue–green" if you have to reduce it to a single category (or maybe even just "green"). Unfortunately paint companies and others don't just tell consumers meaningful, easy to learn, and easy to compare coordinates like this, but instead make up thousands of arbitrary names so you need to describe this color to the paint store as "faded peacock" or some similar nonsense, and there's no way to tell without looking at the swatch book what the relation might be between "faded peacock", "cracked robin egg", "Aztec turquoise", and "vibrant iceberg".

by wrp 2y ago

dullcrisp 2y ago

You could perceive the difference, but then you go home with a swatch of the color instead of just remembering what color it was.

jacobolus 2y ago
Someone with a bit of practice with the Munsell system can remember the difference between, say, 2.5 BG 4/8 and 5 BG 6/6 (the latter is slightly more blue, a bit lighter, and not as saturated), and can both accurately judge the color coordinates on sight and imagine what color some coordinates will represent. But both are just going to be called "teal" or "blue–green" if you have to reduce it to a single category (or maybe even just "green"). Unfortunately paint companies and others don't just tell consumers meaningful, easy to learn, and easy to compare coordinates like this, but instead make up thousands of arbitrary names so you need to describe this color to the paint store as "faded peacock" or some similar nonsense, and there's no way to tell without looking at the swatch book what the relation might be between "faded peacock", "cracked robin egg", "Aztec turquoise", and "vibrant iceberg".