Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language

That's probably attributable to trichromacy, having three classes of retinal cones. The article points this out and correctly notes the complexity of visual circuitry without giving much detail. That's OK, the layers involved in translating retinal impulses, the exquisitely intricate slicing and dicing visual information into encodings for shape, motion, texture, surface, depth as well as color are truly mind-boggling.

That suggests to me that trying to ascertain linguistic influences on the visual system may be a form of "premature optimization". Of course it will be no surprise to find out there are cultural effects on verbal color description and communication conventions. OTOH it's also plausible to suppose that humans of various cultures can distinguish colors equally well when color naming is not demanded.

Artists who care about color don't care about the names colors are called by. What is important is being able to distinguish subtly different colors in order to be able to produce results. On the web #ff8844 doesn't have to have a name, it does the same thing anyway.

At the end of the day it's important to determine if language really changes what we see, or only the modes of communication, styles, fashions and all the layers piled on top of actual sensory experience.

Perhaps in everyday activity who cares if a shade is "orange" vs. "tangerine". When fine color discrimination really counts, in art, engineering, medicine, color names are secondary if necessary at all.

BTW if anyone wants to informally test their own color discrimination ability, I'd recommend looking here: http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge

The legacy of the 20th century is the belief that we are nearly completely creatures of culture rather than biology. We're slowly learning that it isn't true.

The interesting part is why we want to believe it. When you believe that human nature is mostly culture, you feel that you can change it with social action, education, and legislation. The surprises come when people realize that change is not as easy as we would like to think.

In particular, this could explain many similarities that are usually ascribed to genetics, but are actually only there because of commonalities in environment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias

1. Language shapes perception.

2. Biology shapes perception.

3. External reality shapes language.

4. External reality shapes perception.

I'm sure the precise form and extent of each of those "shapes" varies, and I can see why there might be a lot of dispute about those details. But while I can imagine some people wanting to strengthen some of those "shapes" to "determines", I don't see how anyone can reasonably deny any of those statements. (Yes, I think positions like "There is no, objective, external reality" are unreasonable.)

And so yeah, I learned a good bit from this article. And empirical study of words for colours is fascinating and should definitely be pursued. And I wouldn't have guessed that the range of basic colours is so wide. But I found precisely none of the results reported in that article surprising or worldview-shaking.

black – du white – gwyn grey – llwyd red – coch yellow – melyn blue – glas green – gwyrdd brown – gwinau (brown to auburn shades) or cochddu (brown to the dark reddish blacks) purple – porffor (also cochlas, which is a reddish blue) pink – pinc or gwyngoch (for white-ish reds or pale reds) orange – oren or melyngoch (for yellowish reds; a slight evolution from the conjunction of melyn-coch)

I'd suspect that oren and pinc are more recent evolutions in the lexicon, with gwyngoch and the associated red spectrum names, and gwyngoch and its cousins more tightly defining those parts of the spectrum, rather than having an all encompassing grouping for them. That's assumption and not based on evidence beyond my own knowledge of British linguistic evolution though, so take it with a pinch of salt.

It'd be interesting to look at common Brittonic and its modern descendants though and see if and when they change, and whether that has broader implications, similar to the point on "wine-dark".

[1] http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/

Humans evolved color chunking to be able to talk about it.

"His professors and textbooks taught that people could only recognize a color as categorically distinct from others if they had a word for it."

"Scientists had no reason to suspect that cultures divvied it up in similar ways."

And then, the conclusion:

"Cultures seemed to build up their color vocabularies in a predictable way."

As humans, we make things up. There is no getting away from it, due to our limited perspective. Sometimes I muse on the fact that we once thought the Earth was flat because at some point, someone essentially "lied".

It could also be the case that Homer was using a complex metaphor that related the mystery of alcohol, and maybe it's brooding hangover to the dark color of the liquid, and linked that to the dark quality of the sea at times, for example before a storm when the sky is overcast.

Great article!

I know maybe a dozen words for colors, but that doesn't prevent me from seeing the differences between the different tones in a pantone catalogue.