For more on why languages start with words for "dark" and "light", then add red, blue and other colors in order, see my Journal of Irreproducible Results paper "Laundry and the origin of basic color terms": https://righto.com/papers/laundry.pdf
it's a serious paper on a light hearted topic? or absolute nonsense but funny? I'm not certain if the Journal of Irreproducible Results has any standards about these things.
To clarify, the Journal of Irreproducible Results was a magazine of scientific humor. The article is a plausible but absurd explanation for a real linguistic phenomenon, Basic Color Terms.
Rule 4 appears non-universal to me. Japanese historically developed ao (blue) before midori (green) which is still considered a shade of ao. I guess you could argue since the Japanese conception of ao includes both blues and greens that it fits, but it seems odd to me.
Aren't you imposing the modern meaning onto the past? The word didn't mean specifically blue or green originally, but rather both, right? I don't see how this would contradict the fourth rule.
It gets translated to ao. Here's the Japanese wikipedia page ( https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92 ) which among other things notes that the word corresponds to "英語のblue".
This is not unique to Amazonian languages, in fact, it’s observed so much in other languages that I wonder how strange “western” languages are to make this distinction.
I taught English in Mongolia years ago. My students did not make a distinction between orange and yellow. But they had distinct words for shades of blue that came across as primary. It was not a research project, just working interactions.
Orange as a concept didn't arrive in Northern Europe until oranges, the fruit, were imported through (Moorish?) Spain. Chromatically, the space between red and yellow is a lot tighter than the space between yellow and blue. We don't really need a separate color name there, but we have one; it's a distinction that English speakers agree on. If you look at the Munsel color system, one of the first scientific, equidistant color systems, it goes from green, blue, purple, red, yellow, "skipping" orange as a distinct, named color.
Honestly I see a lot of native english speakers struggle with the difference quite often. I drove an old constructio pickup for a while - very much yellow (even according to ford). Yet a very large number of people talked about my big orange truck.
If we're doing one-liners, there are several advantages to:
for i in {0..255}; do printf '\e[48;5;%dm%-10s' "$i" "color$i"; if (( (i >= 16 && i < 232) ? (i%6 == 3) : (i%8 == 7) )); then printf '\e[m\n'; fi; done
There are several more-complete versions floating around on the internet; I have personalized 2 myself ... hmm, I don't seem to have the one I remember that does contrast automatically ...
In Vietnamese, it is basically the same word and they say "sky blue" for "blue" or "green grass". As a result, my partner always gets green/blue in English mixed up.
My 2.5 year old son has trouble telling apart blue and green eventhough our language considers them strictly separate colors, like English. Apparently it takes practice to learn them apart, and maybe it's even impossible if you need to learn it as an adult.
For English speakers, do you think that you have a limitation in your ability to see and distinguish variations of blue because you have a single word, "blue" that covers a range of colors?
In Russian there are two colors for blue, "goluboy" and "siniy". "goluboy" if for lighter blues, and "siniy" is for darker blues.
Does this mean that Russians are more attuned to difference in the concept of blue or just that they have discrete names that are more convenient when talking about some kinds of blue?
Research shows that the way your native language divides colors does affect your ability to distinguish them. For example, a Russian speaker would more quickly and easily distinguish two similar shades if one is goluboy and one is siniy. However, with training, anyone with adequate color vision can learn to be as or more proficient.
I'd argue that demonstrates that practicing distinguishing colors is learned. Some people practice distinguishing colors because their culture tends to to so, such as people who speak Russian. For others, they learn to do it by practicing visual design. Other people just pick it up over time. I mean, after all English has words for "teal" and "turquoise". So it's just a subjective matter of what's common.
This isn't evidence, for example, that language determines or enhances your ability to distinguish color.
I don't experience an internal monologue and don't think of any words at all when looking at colors, yet I have a very good ability to differentiate between subtle hue variants (based on tests I have taken that test exactly this).
If it's true that language affects ability to differentiate hues (I am somewhat skeptical, but certainly open to the possibility), then it seems to me that maybe language just muddies our natural ability. In other words, thinking about the word "blue" might cause you to artificially group colors together that you wouldn't otherwise group.
I want to be clear, it's a small difference in initial ability to distinguish certain colors. If you've spent your whole life dividing colors a certain way, it's a little easier for you to distinguish colors that are on different sides of that boundary.
Nah, those words are more like synonyms than two different colors / groups of colors. They aren't used consistently neither by the same group of people nor between different groups.
This is especially obvious when there's a need to give a precise name / definition (eg. when naming paints or objects with very distinctive color). For example, I've heard cyan translated as either one of those (I studied printing). And when it comes to paints, there's eg. "берлинская лазурь" (the name of a particular pigment and a paint that uses that pigment), which is typically described as голубая, but it's really dark.
In general, it seems that in languages with long history, there's very little in terms of consistency in how speakers name different colors. Meanings "drift" over time. Sometimes they "fork" because of the objects associated with the same color change that color (eg. egg yolk yellow). It's also influenced by availability of pigments and dyes and the companies who manufacture paints. Sometimes these keep labeling, but change the technology used to make paints. In particular, saturation seems to increase with technological advances, but names seems to remain the same.
This, of course, also depends on your audience. If you talk to an arts student or a painter, they will have a different idea about what colors are and how to name them. For instance, an art student would often deny that "white", "black", "brown" or "pink" designate colors -- from a perspective of someone trained in classical painting, these aren't really colors and don't help in describing what / how one should draw something. Similarly, from a perspective of someone who's tasked with painting walls, the division may be imposed by technical limitations (i.e. mixing paints from a particular manufacturer cannot produce a desired hue, if, eg. green paint is used, therefore the painter may believe that the color isn't a shade of green).
You can still see it, but you pay less attention to it, in some cases if the color has no meaning to you, then it you become attention blind to it.
I used to not pay any attention to colors, but I heard men have high rates of color blindness, and I also heard about tetrachromats.
I took a bunch of tests, I'm not color blind, nor am I a tetrachromat, but after those tests I take my color vision more seriously and try to distinguish more colors.
I think that the main point the article tries to make isn't specific to colors. It's about language influencing how our minds process "raw" information.
And, to anyone who speaks more than one language well this is nothing new. Sometimes we don't have a "good" translation for a concept in one language, but because it's accessible to us in another language, we'd invent a way to adapt that concept using the lacking language. This is especially common when translating from a "bigger" language into a smaller one.
For example, early modern Hebrew speakers loaned a lot of concepts from Russian (beside other languages), but because Russian and Hebrew are very different, they had to put some serious effort into adaptation. Ukrainian language underwent a process where a lot of terminology had to be invented or translated from other languages because for years it wasn't used in academia or industry.
Computer-related jargon is full of instances where concepts were borrowed from English but had to be adapted to the loaning language. In Hebrew, it's a subject of many jokes, because early attempts at adaptation tried to rely on Hebrew roots instead of borrowing words / concepts phonetically, but now very few people know what was meant by that (eg. "tsag" -- the early version of translation of "monitor").
I have wondered with colour words if the increasing prevalence of computers and their related vocabulary is influencing English speakers use of colour words.
For instance, as mentioned in the article English speakers have historically divided the range of colours into: Black, White, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Purple, Brown, Orange and Grey. South American Spanish, along with Italian and Russian add a distinction between light-blue and dark-blue (maybe like the distinction between Red and Pink).
In computers the most natural set of colours is more like: Black, White, Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. Has this influenced English speakers to draw incorporate new colour terms into their common vocabulary - Magenta 'feels' too close to pink to be a new colour for me, but Cyan (or equivalently Turquoise or Azure) feels different enough to be a new and distinct colour.
In France purple is not in the set. We have blue, white, red (obviously), black, yellow, green, gray. No orange, no purple, no brown - we of course know these colors but we would not use them when "dividing" colors into sets.
OP mentioned that English speakers have historically divided the range of colours into: Black, White, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Purple, Brown, Orange and Grey.
When we think about "basic colors", we would not add purple, brown or orange to the set. Grey neither know that I think of it.
The color of the soil. All of the languages with a paucity of dedicated color words can readily describe colors by reference. Orange, pink, and violet are not actual color words either. They've been imported to perform dual duty from their original meaning because they were used frequently enough to describe the color of oranges, pinks, and violets.
I just mean that if brown isn't a common color word there, what do school children etc use to describe that color?
Here in the US, "brown" is difference enough from the other colors that I would struggle to find another word for it. "Dark orange" seems really strange, or "yellowish red" is weird too.
OP mentioned that English speakers have historically divided the range of colours into: Black, White, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Purple, Brown, Orange and Grey.
I read it as some kind of spectrum or "main colors" - it does not list all known colors but a set where the others would more or less fit in. This is also not the visual spectrum because gray or black are not there.
For us in France, this spectrum would list the colors I mentioned and it would be good enough to characterize what colors we have. Brown, pink, orange, ... are not part of them, like gold or silver is not either, or salmon or azur.
This is of course a limiting set and we use on an everyday basis "brown", as much as "orange" or "blue", it is just that it is not, historically or culturally, part of the set of "basic colors".
Since colors are not a physical concept anyway, there is a lot of space for interpretation so I would not be surprised if other countries have other sets of basic colors.
It's like in the US we divide the rainbow into "ROYGBIV" (red orange yellow green blue indigo violet), which was quite different from how I learned it in grade school in another country. But in both situations there are still a variety of other color names in common usage.*
So it's the same there. Maybe "brown" (brun?) is common, but it just wouldn't be used as a broad grouping. Thanks for clarifying.
* After learning the rainbow in one language/culture, we then learned about the spectrum in science class. Only after that did I learn the US divisions, ROYGBIV seemed as arbitrary as any other division. I guess there's many ways to do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_color#Spectral_color_...
> we then learned about the spectrum in science class
As an ex-PhD in physics, that part always makes me wince. "Color" as a physical concept does not exist, but we still try to say that "blue" is around 400 nm and "red" 700 or so.
In reality "color" is a concept of our mind that is a complicated averaging/interpolation of the brain based on the response of cones in our eye. While the majority of people has more or less the same reaction, it can vary wildly.
This is also the reason why culturally some colours are more or less important.
> Maybe "brown" (brun?) is common
Your comment made me remember a time I was with my children and some of their friends (they were 3 or 4 yo) and they were discussing about colors, including the soil. While "sly" was "blue", the soil was all kinds of things, including a new color "soily" :)
Computers, especially the sRGB colorspace is severely lacking in the green region. There are many colours that humans can sense that have no corresponding RGB value.
It is interesting that Newton eschewed purple for indigo and violet in the rainbow because he wanted it to have seven colors (it actually doesn't have discrete colors).
It’s not just about different languages. I bet a graphic artist sees distinctions in colors that most people would group together. At the extreme end, Pantone has made a massive business of precisely dividing shades of colors.
[finite_depth says this much better than me in a parallel comment!]
I believe this is explicitly about how 'regular' speakers of languages agree on colours, and which are distinct.
For instance 'lime' can describe a colour - typically a light green. But most English speakers [citation needed] would consider it to be a shade a green, not a distinct colour.
Similarly, looking at this small colour chart of Pantone shades: https://www.wardrobeoxygen.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Pa... - if asked unprompted you probably wouldn't call the shades "Flame Scarlet", "Saffron", and "Chive", but Red, Yellow and Green.
The idea here is not what words a language has names for, but what words a language considers "primary".
"Azure" is an English color-word, but an English speaker recognizes "azure" as a kind of "blue". But "blue" is not a kind of "green" or a kind of "purple" or a kind of anything else. Hence, "blue" is a basic English color-word.
Typical English dialects have eleven basic color words: white, gray, black, brown, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Other color-words in English are considered variants of one of these eleven terms. That wasn't always true ("pink" is the most recent addition, dating to the early 1700s), but it's pretty well-established by modern English speakers. Other languages may make fewer distinctions (e.g. until about the last century Japanese used ao(i) as a basic color word that encompassed both blue and green, so e.g. a traffic light is aoi by tradition even though the modern word for green is midori) or more (e.g. Russian distinguishes light blue goluboi and dark blue sinii similarly to how English distinguishes red and pink). To an old Japanese speaker, blue and green were both shades of ao, and to a modern Russian speaker, goluboi is as distinct from sinii as "red" is from "pink" in English (they are not both "shades of blue" any more than pink and red are "shades of reddish" in English).
Sometimes people use "pink" or "purple" to describe magenta, but (to me) magenta isn't either of those colors. Purple is the color that in technical contexts is known as violet, and pink is absolutely a type of red to me, specifically a desaturated red.
I'm guessing it was more the other way around, based on known etymologies.
The origin is Latin "lapis lazuli", where "lapis" is "stone" (thus not the word of interest here) and "lazuli" is "sky", ultimately from Persian (perhaps "blue stone"). The "laz" part is probably related to Irish "glas" though.
The r/l blur is very common so doesn't help narrow anything down; the Arabic/Persian had "w" anyway.
We can blame French speakers for interpreting it as "l'azuli" with reasonable confidence; I'm vaguely aware that some regional dialects(*) of Spanish do similar but can't find evidence of them preceding French at a glance. Also, France was more dominant than Spain for the relevant periods of history - although Spain did have the direct Arabic connection I guess. It's not like I have good sources here.
* unless they have separate navies, they can't be languages.
There is a fairly involved definition of "basic color word" that goes into this research. Basically, most English speakers would agree that periwinkle is a shade of purple, but would certainly not say that green is a shade of blue. In this sense purple, green, and blue are basic color words but periwinkle is not.
The comments here (not yours, dicytea) are really confusing. There are three comments about Japanese although the article clearly states that they live in the Amazon rainforest. Are those AI bots?
Doesn't seem to be bots. Maybe it's just that Japanese phonetics are so limited, that any word that has a possible pronunciation in Japanese becomes a Japanese word in their mind. Funny pattern matching error.
I have also on (very) rare occasion used Japanese to clear up a pronunciation thing, because of the variety in English. The one that mentions Google Translate I figure probably was doing that, which I kinda took as "...maybe it could be..?" and just wanted to clarify something in my original comment, which I figure added to the confusion in further comments. I tried to keep it clear I wasn't sure it actually was Japanese but I guess that didn't stick.
Roughly, (t)see-ma-nay or chi-ma-nay. The first sound is an affricate consonant, similar to the sounds spelled ch or j in English (e.g. the final sound of "catch" in General American). The last sound should properly be spelled é, not just e, and is similar to the sound spelled with that letter in French or the sound spelled "ay" in English words like "pray" (also in General American).
It's Tsimane' because the name of the language ends in a glottal stop. Sometimes this is mistranscribed into Tsimané in Spanish but that is incorrect; the stress is on the second to last syllable.
> The last sound should properly be spelled é, not just e
Assuming this is a Japanese word as the other response uses (the article doesn't really make it clear), there's at least two different transliteration styles for that sound, one of which is "é", the other of which is "e". I'd argue over the past decade or two the second one has become more common due to simplicity, direct transliteration of individual hiragana, and IME inputs. Names still seem to use the older style though.
Though here the author did seem to be going for "é", but didn't have a way to type it so they approximated it by adding a ' afterwards.
In katakana it's a combination of "tsu" and a small "i" (ツィ), it exists for loanwords. Part of why I'm unsure this is actually a Japanese word despite the other comments - even if it is actually used in Japanese it's probably an approximation of another language.
the other key to pronouncing japanese as an American, starter pack, is to NOT put stress on syllables the way we do. Japanese green horseradish (like with sushi) is not waSAAbi the way we want to pronounce it, it's something like three equal syllables pronounced distinctly wa. sa. bi. then put them together and pronounce them fast wa.sa.bi.
UK English has the same stress patterns as American English (Shakespeare, iambic pentameter) but I just haven't given any thought to whether my advice would be any different
I said "starter pack" because imho the first step is to stop pronouncing things American. Japanese does have some stress patterns, but you're not going to learn them easily. So just learn to flatten out the American stress and you are 80/20 there.
Because you are so used to American stress, to your ear it will sound like you are saying WAAsabi, which is closer to your goal, but don't do that on purpose, and not long syllables, not waaaa saaaa biiii, clip them short and just flatten them out, wasabi and you'll be fine.
