Better title: in a post-hoc test on non-generalizable data, multiple environmental factors were found to correlate with the presence of a word for "blue" in a language, one of which was proximity to the equator. More speculation at 11.
If you get interested in etymology, you'll see that each language encodes the history of who spoke it during the time it was forming and changing (which continues into the present). There's lots to be learned about history by studying languages.
One of my favorite examples is the word "sky". Sky comes from the old norse [1] for "cloud" or "obscured". Presumably when Old English developed on the British Isles, the sky was generally full of clouds. So when they needed a word for the thing above them, they seemingly borrowed the world for "cloudy" instead of "sunny". That probably wouldn't have happened if English developed somewhere with better weather.
This happens a lot in English. English has a lot of meaning drift, even in native words from Anglo Saxon. For example, deer used to mean any animal, but you have hound (any dog), meat (any food), fowl (any bird), and many, many more. You even have stuff like wrist, where it means "joint between hand and arm" in English, by vrist in Swedish means ankle. In earlier proto Germanic I believe it meant multiple things and each language just picked something quite randomly.
Sky in English is basically the same. It originally meant something that obscures, upwards into the heavens.
Presumably people were quite used to clouds. Looking at the etymology of the word, one finds sky in Old Norse, skiwja in Proto-Germanic, similar in Old English and Old Saxon all the way to Proto-Indo-European skewH (to "cover, bedeck").
It is actually fairly normal to name the sky for the things it has in it (clouds, rain, etc), and it is not a strong indicator of how good the weather is.
In Lithuanian we also have "mėlynas" for blue, and "žydras" for light blue. They both are commonly used to describe the sky.
Curiously enough, our neighbours Latvians have "melnais" which looks similar to our "mėlynas", but actually means "black".
Ooh that is cool. If you look at the etymology, it seems like the word meant both black and blue at some point and became fixed to one of the colours in each Baltic language, just not the same colour. So, despise it seeming odd, there is a sane explanation, and it is technically the same word as the words are cognates.
"there is no Blue in Korean" title is very misleading. As is written in the fine article, they certainly have a different word for what in English is commonly called red, blue, and green. It's not lumped together for example so that blue and green would be the same word in Korean.
There is 푸르다 which can refer to green or blue. Specifically “맑은 가을 하늘이나 깊은 바다, 싱싱한 풀의 빛깔과 같이 밝고 선명하다”.
I have no idea what’s up with that article title though. Clearly there is 파랗다/파란색 etc? Edit: the title should be “languages don’t map colors exactly the same and can have more or less words for a color” would be a better title. But I think most people already know that.
The essence of it is "how consistent are our names for colors?" Given an image if I point to this image and ask you the color for the N4 spot - what do you say?
IIRC, 青 in Japanese also can refer to either blue or green, though they also have a dedicated word for green (緑) and that is the one that usually gets used... this can catch people unawares when translating though.
It's interesting that 푸르다 (blue/green) uses a very similar character: 靑, with 青 listed as a variant. Red is the same, 赤 (붉을 적) and yellow (누를 황 / 황색) uses 黃/黄.
Finally I have data to back up my suspicion people use terms like "teal", specially for blue, purple, pink and green hues, almost randomly. It's even worse in Portuguese.
> Languages treat this spectrum in different ways: Some have separate words for “green” and “blue,” others lump the two together. Some barely bother with color terms at all.
Although not mentioned in the article, in Japan the the street light for go is “blue light” (青信号) while in the US it’s a “green light” despite being virtually identical in color.
I’m not sure how this came to be but it’s s fun to dispute amongst international friends (particularly while drinking).
Language is fascinating. I’ve found it interesting that two different cultures can have the exact same idioms. For example in English I say “goosebumps” while in Japanese it’s exact same, tori-hara (鳥肌) or chicken skin. Both cultures map the concept to a bird’s skin.
On a separate linguistic note, you’d probably really love the book “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff. It’s all about how languages have the power to hide and highlight. It blew my mind when I first read it.
One of my favorite wikipedia articles is “Cross-Linguistic Onomatopoeias”[1] because it’s fun to look at the similarities and differences. An article of cross-linguistic idioms would be even more interesting! But probably much more difficult to compile.
Cross-linguistic idioms would be interesting to see. I suspect it has a lot more to do with the etymology of the idioms than anything else. For example, I know that the idiom "I'm a big boy" (meaning "I am capable") works in English and Russian, but in Turkish it comes out sounding more like "I'm a large child". Actually, I found lots of idioms are identical in English/Russian (there are some unique ones to each language), and I suspect it comes from a shared European ancestry.
They also say the English “green”, as pointed out in the Wiki article. So there’s 3. :)
In most context ao is definitely blue. It’s not green at all. The color of the sky is blue. Blue as green shows up in a few spots, the city/prefecture Aomori, the blew Forrest, or aotogarashi, the blue chili pepper (which is like a mini Serrano). I’m not an expert on the language but I’m sure there’s a bunch more.
As a color blind person I go when the light is blue. I don't see green well, so most stoplights get a blue tint to help people like me see the color better.
Most stoplights - it was a shock to me driving one dark night when one of those white lights in front of me suddenly changed to yellow. It didn't have any blue tint, and there was no other indication that I was at an intersection as opposed to just a badly aimed street light. (I has never driven that road before, so I didn't have any other clue)
Also, in the US lights used to be a pure green but were updated to be a blue-green so that color blind people could differentiate the green from red. You can still see the original green in some super old lights that haven't been updated.
That’s why no one should blindly trust Wikipedia. There’s no evidence for the Japanese “go” light ever having a blue color, the first traffic lights in Japan were imported from the US and the first Japanese traffic law to mention traffic lights called them 緑 (green) not 青 (green or blue depending on the context).
There's a fascinating podcast (with transcript) at https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/21121... about linguistic studies that show blue to be the last color named in virtually all languages. There was no blue in the Odyssey or the Iliad because the Greeks didn't have a word for it yet. It appeared a few centuries later. Same in other languages around the world. Centuries of writing with no reference to the color blue, and then one day it appears. The podcast is a good listen.
On a couple occasions, two different cis women said that I must be slightly colorblind because I was assigned male at birth and we disagreed on whether a color (on a physical object we were both looking at) was more blue or more green.
(As far as I can tell, I am not even slightly colorblind.)
I really want this linguistics thing to be known, because I think it's a sufficient explanation that _people just name colors differently and that's fine._
That is getting out of topic fast, but have you checked for blue/green color blindness? This one is not widely tested, come in several different forms, and the most usual "symptom" is that you disagree with everybody about colors being more blueish, greenish, purpleish and etc.
It also doesn't impact much one's life... unless you have to read resistor values every day.
I googled for relevant tests and found colorlitelens.com.
They may not be trustworthy as they are selling something.
However, I took some of the tests (I've never been diagnosed with color blindness by a medical professional) and the results were interesting.
The first couple of tests show a partial ring in a different background, like a rotated "C" and ask you to click on the gap as the contrast gets fainter.
The red-green gap test was easy for me, and I got 100%.
The "Tritan (Blue)" test which might be the relevant one to what you are talking about, was difficult, and it said I was "severely" deficient.
However, after you take that test, it shows two spectrums and says if you are color blind in this sense they should look the same. They look very different to me, no question.
So then I looked further and saw there is another test for the same type of deficiency, which is called the "mosaic" test, I think, where there is a small square made up of a few "tiles" that is a different color and you have to click on it. This one I got mostly right, and it ended up saying I was "slightly" deficient.
It occurs to me, that with LED lights everywhere, and the LED screens on phones, the color deficiency in online tests could be coming from a compromised spectrum of light, not from one's eyesight.
I don't quite understand how disagreeing about what to call colors on the spectrum from blue to green can be a deficiency. A rose by any other name... If you can differentiate between colors that are more blue and ones that are more green, then what significance is a label?
As I say, lighting is important not to overlook.
My first car was basically turquoise, and I tended to think of it as blue or blue-green. Other people did call it green, but for me, there was nuance due to seeing it under many different settings. Under sodium lights, it would look quite blue and not green, and unpleasant to my eye. Under indirect sunlight, it would be blue-green and jewel like.
For reference, while it was a Honda color from many years ago that isn't easy to find good pictures of now, pictures from a GIS for "bmw atlantis blue" show cars that look like exactly the same color to me.
On the other hand "porsche lizard green" does not look blue to me in the least.
"Jade green" seems to me predictably a blue-green color that is greener than turquoise, but still perceptibly bluish.
Colors called "chartreuse" generally look to me like green with a hint of yellow.
Hmm I got a "normal" result on the tritan test (although the last one was quite difficult) but the two spectrums looked exactly the same! I don't really trust this too much. Particularly since it's highly dependent on what screen you view it on.
The spectrum it generates is based on your test result, so if you get a "passing" score the two images are identical (I verified in an image editor that they're functionally identical)
For comparison here's what an "almost passing" image looks like: https://www.colorlitelens.com/images/test/T1.jpg -- the blue section should look a bit darker on the bottom spectrum, and it's a bit more "pastel" in general (but yeah, monitors can confound this a lot).
If I read it right, if you take the test, the two spectra should always look almost exactly the same to you. If you passed, it should look the same for everybody else too (because they are the same). If you didn't pass, somebody else should be able to see a difference.
If they don't look the same to you, it's because something got wrong on the test, and you should discard the result.
Oh, no, disagreeing how to call colors is not a deficiency. But there is a deficiency that causes disagreement on how to call colors (or, well, maybe "deficiency" isn't even the right name, because it doesn't impact your daily live.).
I can attest that those kinds of tests work well even on a screen, maybe not this one (I failed it in approximately the same way I fail every one, so it probably does). If you are in doubt, just show the test (or that color spectrum at the last page) to another person and ask if they can solve it. It is really disconcerting discovering that you don't see colors that everybody else does, and doubting the test is the reaction that nearly everybody has.
Anyway, it may be the case that you just see different colors. I know I can see some UV light that most people can't.
(Oh, and if the spectra looked different, that probably means you made mistakes in the test, getting an error on some image that you could see.)
My wife and I disagreed over whether our duvet was blue or green. I was adamant that it's green, and she that it is blue. (we both agreed it was a blue-green, but if we had to pick which colour was more prominent)
So I took a photo and looked up the RGB values of the pixels to see if it was more green or blue. Turned out it was basically equal values for both. I found that very interesting.
It's fairly well established that eyes of males (sex not gender) are not as good at distinguishing blue vs green as female eyes. If you were born male, your eyes most likely can't see blue and green as well as your friends who were born female.
That's why you hear all those stories about men arguing with their wives about blue vs. green.
> It's fairly well established that eyes of males (sex not gender) are not as good at distinguishing blue vs green as female eyes.
No, its not.
It is, on the other hand, well-established that, on average, female brains are better at distinguishing shades within and between “blue” and “green" (and, really, fine distinctions in colors in general) than male brains are on average. (Similarly, male brains are better at perceiving distinctions in brightness than female brains.)
> In vertebrate embryonic development, the retina and the optic nerve originate as outgrowths of the developing brain, specifically the embryonic diencephalon; thus, the retina is considered part of the central nervous system (CNS) and is actually brain tissue.[2][3]
Accepting that, it doesn't invalidate the parent's point. If we don't know where in the brain the difference arises, the fact that eyes are part of the brain doesn't mean that it arises in that part - there are other parts of the brain.
That said, I expect you weren't meaning to restrict consideration to the physical eyes (the distinction does not seem relevant to the previous discussion) and using "eyes" as synecdoche for the entire visual perceptual system seems entirely reasonable (making dragonwriter's a potentially interesting clarification but not a disagreement).
When translating Russian, both are usually translated as blue. Синий is used about dark blue things, like the sea, and голубой about light blue things, like the sky.
But translating it to "dark/light blue" would be incorrect, as the lightness is not an important part of the words. It is just that Russian speakers are forced to specify the lightness, similarly to how German speakers are forced to specify the sex of their neighbor (Nachbar/Nachbarin). In most cases, Nachbarin should simply be translated to "neighbor".
I'm not sure how many different interpretations there are of "cyan". What I think of first is RGB(0,255,255) because of mostly encountering the term in relation to computers since the 1980s. Or whatever the cyan in CMYK is, I assume it's similar.
But that's likely not the traditional meaning of it, in whatever language. So I don't assume that I know what cyaan is.
This post is maybe a little off topic, but the view of linguistic relativism and specifically of Whorf (Sapir–Whorf hypothesis - linguistic relativism), as well as many 19th and 20th century philosophers, was that the Ancient Greeks must have viewed the world differently to us, or to put it bluntly, that all ancient peoples must have been colour blind. This then extends to the modern day, do Russian speakers view the world differently because of the separation of light and dark blue, are English (and most other language speakers) blind to the colour голубой as it's grouped together with 'blue'?
When the significance of синий and голубой have been studied an effect is seen, Russians are faster at differentiating between these shades of blue. When it's put this way and framed positively it's absolutely an alluring idea and one used to sell language books, learn Russian to literally see the world differently, but is it significant? Russians are about 125ms faster at differentiating between shades of light and dark blue because having a separate word to group them into does confer some advantage, but importantly English speakers are still just as capable of distinguishing those shades. This is also true even for languages that lack distinction between other colours, a particular language not having a separation between say blue and green doesn't mean that speakers of that language are any less capable of seeing a distinction between blue and green even if they refer to those two colours using just one word.
Another example of the issues of applying such findings to a world view would be Mandarin which represents the month before as 'above' and the next month as 'below', and studies do show that Mandarin speakers are faster at determining whether March comes before April after having been shown a picture with some verticality. When looking at these results through a Whorfian lens it'd be easy to make the claim that Mandarin speakers view time as vertically. More studies were done, Mandarin speakers were once again faster at guessing up was previous (compared to down for previous) by 170ms. Seems conclusive and further evidence that Mandarin speakers may view time as being vertical, however, the same study found that mandarin speakers were 230ms faster at guessing left as previous (compared to right for previous) and they were faster at doing this than they were doing it vertically. Also noteworthy was that they found English speakers were 300ms faster at guessing left for previous than compared to right, and in both cases of vertical/horizontal guessing English speakers were faster than Mandarin speakers (although English speakers preferred bottom as previous to top as previous).
This is where the issues of linguistic relativism pop up and why today it's generally heavily criticised and no longer considered valid by linguists, when applied to colours or time it appears relatively harmless but it's not always framed positively and that has been the case for as long as the theory existed. An example of a harmful application of it would be to look at the many African languages that use the same word for meat and animal, are they incapable of telling a difference between them? In English it's often pointed out that the term beef comes from the French aristocracy where the term cow comes from the Anglo-Saxon speaking peasant/serf class, which of these two would have been more acquainted with raising and slaughtering the animals and would they have been unable to make the differentiation? We absolutely know today that even despite lacking terms for certain colours people are still able to differentiate between them, to know this after having studied it and then say that the Ancient Greeks must have been colour blind seems absurd.
>So then what does it mean for languages who split blue into two colors?
Personally? It's really neat and being able to differentiate those shades faster is an interesting conseq...
Very good points on linguistic relativity. I'd also be interested in if any of the studies have been replicated or not. One of the big proponents of linguistic relativity is Lera Boroditsky, author of the famed 'bridge gender study' (that was never actually published!). However, someone tried to replicate that study and they found no statistically meaningful results. I'd be very interested in seeing it for other 'weak linguistic relativity' studies. I'd also be interested to see the debate between language and culture. Is it the culture noticing something that causes the language to develop that way, and influences things? In my view, that's more likely the source of any differences, though I'm still not sure they actually exist.
I can't take credit for the arguments made, they mostly come form the excellent book 'The Language Hoax' by John McWhorter, I should have referenced this in the original comment but it's a bit too late to edit it. In the book he takes a very hard stance against linguistic relativism and demonstrates the harm the theory can have when applied by certain people to certain languages or peoples, he even goes as far as to caution about the recent trend for weak relativism. There's also a 45 minute talk he did on the book as well (0).
One example in the book would be the Pirahã who famously don't have words for numbers, they can describe 1 'that', 2 'pair', a few, and many, but not much else. It wouldn't be hard to imagine the harm that would be caused by taking a Whorfian approach would have on such a tribe. In this subchapter he does make the point that it's culture that drives the linguistics, and the subtitle of which is pretty pertinent, 'Tribe without Paper or Pencils Mysteriously Weak at Portraiture'.
Lera Boroditsky is a good mention as well, she authored both of the mentioned studies on Mandarin. The first was 'Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time' (2001) (1). Other researchers have tried to replicate this study (2) and were unable to do so, although they note that all documented examples of linguistic relativity can't be dismissed just from one flawed study, and explicitly note that the effect of the mechanisms is unknown and that the issue is with the claim that language is the mechanism. Boroditsky followed up with 'Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently?' (2010) (3). It still seems to be an active area of research and I don't think we'll get a conclusive answer any time soon.
Modern Russians can differentiate between much more bluish colors, such as "sea wave", turquose, etc. I think it's the same with any people exposed to modern paints and hues so the effect is bound to be less important.
But they are not considered as separate spectral colors, whereas light blue is. So Russians have 7 colors in the rainbow.
I don't think that learning Russian will help your color perception in adult age and without being exposed to light blue paints, pyramid disks, toys, etc.
In fact, I'm not sure it will persist as much in the next generation of Russian children whose toys are usually made for world wide audience and don't set the light blue color out of myriad of hues.
Interesting point. I learned Russian as an adult for work -- and my colleagues always told me that Russians see the difference between the two blues the same way that we as English speakers see the difference between "pink" and "red". Pink is technically light red, but there is immense cultural significance invested in making the distinction.
Yep. Modern Russian children will have easier time telling pink from red than light blue from blue since they share the common material culture with the rest of world, but otherwise you are spot on.
Pink is another little color which appeared a short time ago and permanently extended our palette.
It's not that languages develop a word for blue last, but that there's usually a specific order in which terms for colour enter languages. It's roughly as follows: all languages have words for white/black, if they have 3 terms for colour the third will always be red. After that it's green and/or yellow. Only then do you get blue or blue-and-green. This can also be seen in the writings of Homer where honey is described as green, and hair is described as... blue, that is, the same term was used to describe the sea as well as corn flours (i.e., a dark colour). It's with Empidocles that we see the classification of colour the Ancient Greeks would have used: light, dark, red, and yellow.
After blue/blue-and-green the order breaks down a bit, but new colour terms obviously come into use after blue. In English for instance the terms for pink, orange, and brown all came long after blue. Coincidentally brown is usually one of the last colours to get its own term, and in English before the term brown was used to refer to a colour it referred to dark or dusk.
I would imagine the dyes were referred to by the materials used to create them, cochineal for a red dye, woad for a blue/indigo dye, etc. The etymology of purple does come from a shellfish or a fish and purple dye did historically come from a sea snail but the name for that particular dye likely didn't come from the same root as purple.
What might be missed is that black and blue are not necessarily differentiated. I know that, at least among Indian languages specifically Sanskrit, black and blue aren't as differentiated as they are today. A dark color/black was seen as dark blue.
Pink and orange are not basic color words. They're the names of physical objects co-opted as a general color. It's the same for all the cultures that don't have a word for blue. Their users just refer to blue as the "color of the sky" or the "color of bird X". Same as English using the "color of this citrus".
> linguistic studies that show blue to be the last color named in virtually all languages
In Irish, the term "fear dubh" refers to the devil literally "black man" which presumably long preceded Irish language interaction with non-whites. To refer to a black (coloured) man in modern Irish the term "fear gorm" is used. The word 'gorm' in other contexts means blue. This would match your comment.
As an aside, the term "fear bán" is literally "white man" and I leave it to the curious to guess or research it's meaning.
In this case, there's multiple issues going on here. First 'gorm' in the case of 'fear gorm' didn't mean blue. It meant 'dusky', 'swarthy'. Also, 'fear dubh' refers to a black-haired person; 'An Fear Dubh' refers to the devil. 'Fear bán' would likely refer to hair color. Irish traditionally classified people on their hair color (thus 'Roisín dubh' was 'Roisín of the dark hair', not that she was dark complected).
Another big issue is Irish colors don't match up to English ones, at all. So many seem to think 'gorm' matches up to English 'blue', when it doesn't. It's different. Same with 'glas' and 'green', which is why you can have 'capall glas' or a 'green horse', but really it's a different color split that English. Same with 'spéir glas' to describe a 'grey sky'. It's a huge problem among learners who learn the language incorrectly (most in Ireland, sadly).
Tá an ceart agat. My 'fear dubh' was intended to be "An Fear Dubh". If you are male you have "An Fear Bán", the colour of men's clothing presumably being dark in contrast!
This thing again. I think all the misunderstanding starts from this one person misinterpreting Homer's "wine-dark sea" to mean blue. No. It means on the deep black sea.
In my own interpretation, Homer refers to the colour of red wine as you can see in a black earthenware cup of the sort that was common in ancient Greece, or a bronze crater, both very dark, and actually not so different from the colour of seawater as seen from a boat offshore (not exactly black, but not really coloured either).
> There was no blue in the Odyssey or the Iliad because the Greeks didn't have a word for it yet.
That's not true. From the description of Alcinoos' palace in Odyssey 7.87: περὶ δὲ θριγκὸς κυάνοιο ("around was a cornice of blue enamel"). κύανος is dark blue, and it is used later in Greek to describe the color of lapis lazuli. In the Iliad it's used of blue enamel on armor, as at Iliad 11.24: τοῦ δ' ἤτοι δέκα οἶμοι ἔσαν μέλανος κυάνοιο ("there were ten stripes of dark blue enamel") on the breastplate of Agamemnon, and κυάνεοι δράκοντες ("blue enamel snakes") two lines later.
In later stages of Greek it meant blue, but I also had read how for Homer it probably did not mean that. Here's a quote from the related Wikipedia entry:
The word kyanós (κυανός), which in later stages of Greek meant blue, does make a limited appearance, but for Homer it almost certainly meant "dark", as it was used to describe the eyebrows of Zeus.
It's really interesting, but I've noticed the same pattern in development with my kids. My eldest had a strong tendency to label blue things as "green".
I'll have to test him for color blindness of course, but I don't think that's the issue. I think it's just that the two are more similar than it appears to me as an adult.
Huh, I was told that night vision would get worse after LASIK, but the main thing I found was that blue signs, particularly white text on a lit blue background, is illegible for me at night. Maybe all I was actually noticing is ordinary human limitations.
White text on a blue background are what we used for Wordperfect for DOS in the ye olden days specifically because the white popped out of the background. If this is paradoxically worse, then maybe there is an actual problem. But I would look at white console text on a blue background on a computer monitor first before reaching any conclusion.
Maybe related: Why do "red" products (i.e., dyes, paints, markers, pencils, pens) from China appear red-orange? Does it have something to do with language?
In English, generic "red" used to mean something very close to orange (thus red hair, red-breasted robins, etc.). Blood red or rose red were usually called out. These days, outside of colour spaces, we distinguish between crimson (cold/bluish) and scarlet (warm/orangish) when it actually matters, and the default "red" is somewhere in the middle, probably because we added orange to the lexicon.
A thing that stuck with me is how European explorers thought some natives were colorblind because they didn't have words for blue. The scientists at the time concluded that it's obviously because the natives hadn't evolved color-vision. Or weren't given color-vision by God. This theory got cast into doubt when it turned out that the natives could easily distinguish strings with different shades of blue.
The book goes on to show that languages tend to add words for colors in a certain sequence. I think it was first red, then green, then yellow ad other colors and last blue.
So this study looks more like it found the last languages who wouldn't have added blue were in sunny places. Not that the speaker have impaired color vision.
Anyone interested in this topic should feel free to check out the work of Paul Kay at Berkeley, who did the groundwork for this line of research, starting back in the 60's and 70's.
First sentence: "Color is a spectrum: Red fades from orange to yellow, whereas green merges to turquoise, then blue." Not true… Or where is brown on this spectrum?
Browns are dark oranges. The only color you won't find in the spectrum is purple, which is the combination of red and violet. Take a look at the "CIE color diagram", all the colors on the perimeter of the curved line are single wavelength colors. The straight line at the bottom requires a combination.
This "lens brunescence" theory is very odd and likely wrong: lens yellowing does not impact the ability to distinguish blue from green under even modest illumination levels. While it's a substantial effect by age 90 [1], it would be also be strange to assume that 90 year olds are responsible for all of language.
In mammals, the primary opponent color channel is along the B-Y axis (comparisons between the S-cone to the M-cone), so many mammals are dichromats, and tritanopia is quite rare. Color adaptation is also quite effective along this axis, which means people adapt to changes in yellow vs. blue quite readily, seeing a wide range of colors as "white".
Here's an alternate hypothesis: more daylight gives more days with a "blue sky" (instead of an overcast one), and so people in sunny climates would be much more likely to need a word to describe what they see.
I am always a bit suspicions of statistics on countries or other geographical groups of people. The data points are not really independent samples. To take an extreme example, imagine you have a dataset containing Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. I'm sure you could find all kinds of interesting correlations there, but I wouldn't trust them because you really only have two data points: Scandinavia and South America. Even if your dataset has all the counties of the world many of them have a shared history and influenced each other, so correlations between variables may be accidental.
To return to the topic of colors, I wonder why the light or dark versions of some colors are called something else. I can easily imagine a light blue or a dark blue and they are still clearly blue. Same with light or dark green. Dark red is fine, but light red becomes pink. Yellow always feels like a light color, and dark yellow becomes some kind of brown. Is there a physical reason, or are these arbitrary cultural distinctions?
I think these are precisely the arbitrary cultural distinctions people are arguing about. I too feel that the difference between pink and red is categorical whereas that between pale and dark blue is mere nuance. Apparently Russian speakers feel about dark and pale blue as I do about red and pink.
I am a linguist, so I've been aware of this debate for quite some time, though I've never followed it that closely. What I don't understand is how anyone operationalizes this notion of "basic color terms". English has hundreds of color terms at least, but the "basic" ones are supposed to be white, black, grey, red, green, blue, orange, yellow, purple, brown, and pink (I don't think I'm missing any). People agree on this list and accept it. They agree on a different list for Russian, adding one more, which is roughly cyan. They agree on different lists for Xhosa and Nahuatl and so forth. But how do they come to agree? I agree that the list given for English feels right. Is this all they do? "Does this feel right? Yes." That seems like a weak basis for such a long-term debate. On the other hand, much of the evidence argued over in linguistics is of this nature. "Does this sound odd to you, other linguist? Yes. Data!"
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadUnexplained correlation with population size.
No explanation what "dedicated word for blue" means.
No discussion of language evolution (was the word recently acquired, e.g., through borrowing; this is briefly mentioned in the text).
High quality paper.
One of my favorite examples is the word "sky". Sky comes from the old norse [1] for "cloud" or "obscured". Presumably when Old English developed on the British Isles, the sky was generally full of clouds. So when they needed a word for the thing above them, they seemingly borrowed the world for "cloudy" instead of "sunny". That probably wouldn't have happened if English developed somewhere with better weather.
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/sky
While the primary meaning for “sky” is “cloud”, a more rarely found form, “i sky” (literally “in cloud”), means “in the sky”.
Presumably people were quite used to clouds. Looking at the etymology of the word, one finds sky in Old Norse, skiwja in Proto-Germanic, similar in Old English and Old Saxon all the way to Proto-Indo-European skewH (to "cover, bedeck").
Look at wiktionary.org - hours of fun.
It is actually fairly normal to name the sky for the things it has in it (clouds, rain, etc), and it is not a strong indicator of how good the weather is.
- Hue Color Comparisons: https://uwdata.github.io/color-naming-in-different-languages...
- There Is No “Blue” in Korean: https://medium.com/hci-design-at-uw/there-is-no-blue-in-kore...
The interactive color maps are excellent.
I have no idea what’s up with that article title though. Clearly there is 파랗다/파란색 etc? Edit: the title should be “languages don’t map colors exactly the same and can have more or less words for a color” would be a better title. But I think most people already know that.
And various versions of the article
https://npg.si.edu/object/posts_d6c837d227c59da175620b8eaa18...
https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/pmc5635863
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/40/10785/tab-article-info
The essence of it is "how consistent are our names for colors?" Given an image if I point to this image and ask you the color for the N4 spot - what do you say?
https://images.theconversation.com/files/186280/original/fil...
I'm going to say "Blue". How many other people (who speak English natively) answer it the same?
Aside: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ is also rather interesting in that domain.
Green (녹색) uses 綠. There's also 초록 which is 草綠.
赤: https://hanja.dict.naver.com/#/entry/ccko/ad2ad1893b5c49f8ab...
黃: https://hanja.dict.naver.com/#/entry/ccko/17a2b69699474d5bb8...
I’m not sure how this came to be but it’s s fun to dispute amongst international friends (particularly while drinking).
I love these sorts of things. Language fascinates me so much, I hope to learn more about linguistics some day.
> particularly while drinking
Hopefully not while driving through blue green lights!
On a separate linguistic note, you’d probably really love the book “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff. It’s all about how languages have the power to hide and highlight. It blew my mind when I first read it.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoei...
It does: midori (緑) and ao (青)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ao_(color)#Ao_versus_midori
In most context ao is definitely blue. It’s not green at all. The color of the sky is blue. Blue as green shows up in a few spots, the city/prefecture Aomori, the blew Forrest, or aotogarashi, the blue chili pepper (which is like a mini Serrano). I’m not an expert on the language but I’m sure there’s a bunch more.
A "greenhorn" or other inexperienced person is also Aoi.
A youth / person in the springtime of their life is 青春.
The etymology of that is different though. In Japanese it's because babies have a blue spot on their ass.
Most stoplights - it was a shock to me driving one dark night when one of those white lights in front of me suddenly changed to yellow. It didn't have any blue tint, and there was no other indication that I was at an intersection as opposed to just a badly aimed street light. (I has never driven that road before, so I didn't have any other clue)
At one point the traffic law referred to 緑色 traffic lights, but was updated to 青色 post-war in the 1940s. It still means ao (green) not ao (blue).
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light#Variations
(As far as I can tell, I am not even slightly colorblind.)
I really want this linguistics thing to be known, because I think it's a sufficient explanation that _people just name colors differently and that's fine._
It also doesn't impact much one's life... unless you have to read resistor values every day.
They may not be trustworthy as they are selling something.
However, I took some of the tests (I've never been diagnosed with color blindness by a medical professional) and the results were interesting.
The first couple of tests show a partial ring in a different background, like a rotated "C" and ask you to click on the gap as the contrast gets fainter.
The red-green gap test was easy for me, and I got 100%.
The "Tritan (Blue)" test which might be the relevant one to what you are talking about, was difficult, and it said I was "severely" deficient.
However, after you take that test, it shows two spectrums and says if you are color blind in this sense they should look the same. They look very different to me, no question.
So then I looked further and saw there is another test for the same type of deficiency, which is called the "mosaic" test, I think, where there is a small square made up of a few "tiles" that is a different color and you have to click on it. This one I got mostly right, and it ended up saying I was "slightly" deficient.
It occurs to me, that with LED lights everywhere, and the LED screens on phones, the color deficiency in online tests could be coming from a compromised spectrum of light, not from one's eyesight.
I don't quite understand how disagreeing about what to call colors on the spectrum from blue to green can be a deficiency. A rose by any other name... If you can differentiate between colors that are more blue and ones that are more green, then what significance is a label?
As I say, lighting is important not to overlook.
My first car was basically turquoise, and I tended to think of it as blue or blue-green. Other people did call it green, but for me, there was nuance due to seeing it under many different settings. Under sodium lights, it would look quite blue and not green, and unpleasant to my eye. Under indirect sunlight, it would be blue-green and jewel like.
For reference, while it was a Honda color from many years ago that isn't easy to find good pictures of now, pictures from a GIS for "bmw atlantis blue" show cars that look like exactly the same color to me.
On the other hand "porsche lizard green" does not look blue to me in the least.
"Jade green" seems to me predictably a blue-green color that is greener than turquoise, but still perceptibly bluish.
Colors called "chartreuse" generally look to me like green with a hint of yellow.
For comparison here's what an "almost passing" image looks like: https://www.colorlitelens.com/images/test/T1.jpg -- the blue section should look a bit darker on the bottom spectrum, and it's a bit more "pastel" in general (but yeah, monitors can confound this a lot).
If they don't look the same to you, it's because something got wrong on the test, and you should discard the result.
I can attest that those kinds of tests work well even on a screen, maybe not this one (I failed it in approximately the same way I fail every one, so it probably does). If you are in doubt, just show the test (or that color spectrum at the last page) to another person and ask if they can solve it. It is really disconcerting discovering that you don't see colors that everybody else does, and doubting the test is the reaction that nearly everybody has.
Anyway, it may be the case that you just see different colors. I know I can see some UV light that most people can't.
(Oh, and if the spectra looked different, that probably means you made mistakes in the test, getting an error on some image that you could see.)
So I took a photo and looked up the RGB values of the pixels to see if it was more green or blue. Turned out it was basically equal values for both. I found that very interesting.
That's why you hear all those stories about men arguing with their wives about blue vs. green.
No, its not.
It is, on the other hand, well-established that, on average, female brains are better at distinguishing shades within and between “blue” and “green" (and, really, fine distinctions in colors in general) than male brains are on average. (Similarly, male brains are better at perceiving distinctions in brightness than female brains.)
They feed signal in to the brain.
You wouldn't say your nostrils or mouth or skin or ears are part of the brain. Why would eyes be different?
> In vertebrate embryonic development, the retina and the optic nerve originate as outgrowths of the developing brain, specifically the embryonic diencephalon; thus, the retina is considered part of the central nervous system (CNS) and is actually brain tissue.[2][3]
From https://www.britannica.com/science/retina
> Retina, layer of nervous tissue that covers the inside of the back two-thirds of the eyeball,
Anyway. I'm still not convinced eyes = retina = brain so ill leave it there.
That said, I expect you weren't meaning to restrict consideration to the physical eyes (the distinction does not seem relevant to the previous discussion) and using "eyes" as synecdoche for the entire visual perceptual system seems entirely reasonable (making dragonwriter's a potentially interesting clarification but not a disagreement).
I think your previous comment didn't quite do its job, and including this would've been a big improvement, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But translating it to "dark/light blue" would be incorrect, as the lightness is not an important part of the words. It is just that Russian speakers are forced to specify the lightness, similarly to how German speakers are forced to specify the sex of their neighbor (Nachbar/Nachbarin). In most cases, Nachbarin should simply be translated to "neighbor".
But that's likely not the traditional meaning of it, in whatever language. So I don't assume that I know what cyaan is.
When the significance of синий and голубой have been studied an effect is seen, Russians are faster at differentiating between these shades of blue. When it's put this way and framed positively it's absolutely an alluring idea and one used to sell language books, learn Russian to literally see the world differently, but is it significant? Russians are about 125ms faster at differentiating between shades of light and dark blue because having a separate word to group them into does confer some advantage, but importantly English speakers are still just as capable of distinguishing those shades. This is also true even for languages that lack distinction between other colours, a particular language not having a separation between say blue and green doesn't mean that speakers of that language are any less capable of seeing a distinction between blue and green even if they refer to those two colours using just one word.
Another example of the issues of applying such findings to a world view would be Mandarin which represents the month before as 'above' and the next month as 'below', and studies do show that Mandarin speakers are faster at determining whether March comes before April after having been shown a picture with some verticality. When looking at these results through a Whorfian lens it'd be easy to make the claim that Mandarin speakers view time as vertically. More studies were done, Mandarin speakers were once again faster at guessing up was previous (compared to down for previous) by 170ms. Seems conclusive and further evidence that Mandarin speakers may view time as being vertical, however, the same study found that mandarin speakers were 230ms faster at guessing left as previous (compared to right for previous) and they were faster at doing this than they were doing it vertically. Also noteworthy was that they found English speakers were 300ms faster at guessing left for previous than compared to right, and in both cases of vertical/horizontal guessing English speakers were faster than Mandarin speakers (although English speakers preferred bottom as previous to top as previous).
This is where the issues of linguistic relativism pop up and why today it's generally heavily criticised and no longer considered valid by linguists, when applied to colours or time it appears relatively harmless but it's not always framed positively and that has been the case for as long as the theory existed. An example of a harmful application of it would be to look at the many African languages that use the same word for meat and animal, are they incapable of telling a difference between them? In English it's often pointed out that the term beef comes from the French aristocracy where the term cow comes from the Anglo-Saxon speaking peasant/serf class, which of these two would have been more acquainted with raising and slaughtering the animals and would they have been unable to make the differentiation? We absolutely know today that even despite lacking terms for certain colours people are still able to differentiate between them, to know this after having studied it and then say that the Ancient Greeks must have been colour blind seems absurd.
>So then what does it mean for languages who split blue into two colors?
Personally? It's really neat and being able to differentiate those shades faster is an interesting conseq...
One example in the book would be the Pirahã who famously don't have words for numbers, they can describe 1 'that', 2 'pair', a few, and many, but not much else. It wouldn't be hard to imagine the harm that would be caused by taking a Whorfian approach would have on such a tribe. In this subchapter he does make the point that it's culture that drives the linguistics, and the subtitle of which is pretty pertinent, 'Tribe without Paper or Pencils Mysteriously Weak at Portraiture'.
Lera Boroditsky is a good mention as well, she authored both of the mentioned studies on Mandarin. The first was 'Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time' (2001) (1). Other researchers have tried to replicate this study (2) and were unable to do so, although they note that all documented examples of linguistic relativity can't be dismissed just from one flawed study, and explicitly note that the effect of the mechanisms is unknown and that the issue is with the claim that language is the mechanism. Boroditsky followed up with 'Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently?' (2010) (3). It still seems to be an active area of research and I don't think we'll get a conclusive answer any time soon.
(0) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QglKeIIC5Ds
(1) http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/mandarin.pdf
(2) 'Re-evaluating evidence for linguistic relativity: Reply to Boroditsky (2001)' https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-karin-stromswold/p...
(3) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.690...
But they are not considered as separate spectral colors, whereas light blue is. So Russians have 7 colors in the rainbow.
I don't think that learning Russian will help your color perception in adult age and without being exposed to light blue paints, pyramid disks, toys, etc.
In fact, I'm not sure it will persist as much in the next generation of Russian children whose toys are usually made for world wide audience and don't set the light blue color out of myriad of hues.
The first Blue is like a cyan colour, the second indigo-blue is the colour of blue ink (a night-sky blue).
Pink is another little color which appeared a short time ago and permanently extended our palette.
After blue/blue-and-green the order breaks down a bit, but new colour terms obviously come into use after blue. In English for instance the terms for pink, orange, and brown all came long after blue. Coincidentally brown is usually one of the last colours to get its own term, and in English before the term brown was used to refer to a colour it referred to dark or dusk.
Black / Then / White are / All I see / In my infancy / Red and yellow then came to be
Fun fact: syllable count follows Fibbonaci sequence
In Irish, the term "fear dubh" refers to the devil literally "black man" which presumably long preceded Irish language interaction with non-whites. To refer to a black (coloured) man in modern Irish the term "fear gorm" is used. The word 'gorm' in other contexts means blue. This would match your comment.
As an aside, the term "fear bán" is literally "white man" and I leave it to the curious to guess or research it's meaning.
Another big issue is Irish colors don't match up to English ones, at all. So many seem to think 'gorm' matches up to English 'blue', when it doesn't. It's different. Same with 'glas' and 'green', which is why you can have 'capall glas' or a 'green horse', but really it's a different color split that English. Same with 'spéir glas' to describe a 'grey sky'. It's a huge problem among learners who learn the language incorrectly (most in Ireland, sadly).
Tá an ceart agat. My 'fear dubh' was intended to be "An Fear Dubh". If you are male you have "An Fear Bán", the colour of men's clothing presumably being dark in contrast!
That's not true. From the description of Alcinoos' palace in Odyssey 7.87: περὶ δὲ θριγκὸς κυάνοιο ("around was a cornice of blue enamel"). κύανος is dark blue, and it is used later in Greek to describe the color of lapis lazuli. In the Iliad it's used of blue enamel on armor, as at Iliad 11.24: τοῦ δ' ἤτοι δέκα οἶμοι ἔσαν μέλανος κυάνοιο ("there were ten stripes of dark blue enamel") on the breastplate of Agamemnon, and κυάνεοι δράκοντες ("blue enamel snakes") two lines later.
The word kyanós (κυανός), which in later stages of Greek meant blue, does make a limited appearance, but for Homer it almost certainly meant "dark", as it was used to describe the eyebrows of Zeus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer)
Also see this 2015 paper:
Wine-Dark Sheep: Ancient Color in a Modern Greek Odyssey
https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=111...
I'll have to test him for color blindness of course, but I don't think that's the issue. I think it's just that the two are more similar than it appears to me as an adult.
https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/30600/why-cant-t...
Terminal drives me nuts because red text appears to be floating behind everything else. Blue text is similar. Is incredibly distracting.
"In the middle" is red. Red is red. It's not red-orange. It's not red-blue.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8444621-through-the-lang...
A thing that stuck with me is how European explorers thought some natives were colorblind because they didn't have words for blue. The scientists at the time concluded that it's obviously because the natives hadn't evolved color-vision. Or weren't given color-vision by God. This theory got cast into doubt when it turned out that the natives could easily distinguish strings with different shades of blue.
The book goes on to show that languages tend to add words for colors in a certain sequence. I think it was first red, then green, then yellow ad other colors and last blue.
So this study looks more like it found the last languages who wouldn't have added blue were in sunny places. Not that the speaker have impaired color vision.
https://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/
In mammals, the primary opponent color channel is along the B-Y axis (comparisons between the S-cone to the M-cone), so many mammals are dichromats, and tritanopia is quite rare. Color adaptation is also quite effective along this axis, which means people adapt to changes in yellow vs. blue quite readily, seeing a wide range of colors as "white".
Here's an alternate hypothesis: more daylight gives more days with a "blue sky" (instead of an overcast one), and so people in sunny climates would be much more likely to need a word to describe what they see.
1. For lens yellowing, see https://people.brandeis.edu/~sekuler/SensoryProcessesMateria... for an illustration.
To return to the topic of colors, I wonder why the light or dark versions of some colors are called something else. I can easily imagine a light blue or a dark blue and they are still clearly blue. Same with light or dark green. Dark red is fine, but light red becomes pink. Yellow always feels like a light color, and dark yellow becomes some kind of brown. Is there a physical reason, or are these arbitrary cultural distinctions?
I am a linguist, so I've been aware of this debate for quite some time, though I've never followed it that closely. What I don't understand is how anyone operationalizes this notion of "basic color terms". English has hundreds of color terms at least, but the "basic" ones are supposed to be white, black, grey, red, green, blue, orange, yellow, purple, brown, and pink (I don't think I'm missing any). People agree on this list and accept it. They agree on a different list for Russian, adding one more, which is roughly cyan. They agree on different lists for Xhosa and Nahuatl and so forth. But how do they come to agree? I agree that the list given for English feels right. Is this all they do? "Does this feel right? Yes." That seems like a weak basis for such a long-term debate. On the other hand, much of the evidence argued over in linguistics is of this nature. "Does this sound odd to you, other linguist? Yes. Data!"