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And this changes over time, because for me cyan IS a basic colour term and I'm a native English speaker.

• vigilantpuma 5mo ago
  With all due respect, you're one individual and basic color terms for a language are not determined by a single individual. If you look at usage via proxies like Google ngrams[1] or Google trends[2], cyan barely registers, which suggests it hasn't really shifted to a basic color term. [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=black%2Cwhite%2Cred%2Cgreen%2Cyellow%2Cblue%2Cbrown%2Cpurple%2Cpink%2Corange%2Ccyan&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=black%2Cwhite%... [2] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Red%2Cgreen%2Cyellow%2Cblue%2Cbrown%2Cpink%2Cpurple%2Ccyan&date=all&geo=US https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Red%2Cgreen%2Cyellow%2Cb...
  • djaro 5mo ago
    But its frequency still rose by over 300x since the start of the chart, which might suggest that for some people it is a basic color term. "English" isn't one monolith. Every English speaker speaks their own version, some closer to each other than others, and new features are constantly being added or removed.
    • vigilantpuma 5mo ago
      The further you have to narrow down the set of speakers for whom it's a basic color term, the less of a basic color term it is for English as a whole. We don't have to have this argument about e.g. orange.