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Comment by mzs | Hacker News Reader

Polish has two reds - czerwony and rudy - I mean in the sense that even a young Polish child would use the different words for different colors that a young English speaking American child would call both simply red.

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Similarly, Russian has two blues: goluboy (like the sky) and siniy (like the sea). Nobody, not even a child, would confuse the two, or consider them the same color. Even blue eyes are differentiated into these two categories, just like English speakers differentiate between blue and green eyes.

I see the Russian distinction between blues equivalent to the distinction between red and pink for English speakers.

I'd disagree. As an English speaker, you probably think of pink as a "light red" or a "shade of red" or "red with some white pigment mixed in"; while red is a fundamental color. As a Russian speaker, goluboy is not a shade of siny - the two colors are equally fundamental.

They're typically taught to children as distinct colors.

The first three images google gave me for "kindergarten colors":

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kkd-_JfiGWA/TUdXevHfRUI/AAAAAAAAAb...

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/fe/a8/da/fea8dad8f...

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0MfwZHSO9lA/maxresdefault.jpg

The easiest way to tell is to ask about colors in the rainbow. Obviously, rainbow is actually a spectrum with no clear boundaries, so where the boundaries are placed is entirely down to the culture of the person describing it.

In Russian, sky blue is a distinct rainbow color from blue, but pink is not.

In English, blue and indigo are treated as distinct colors, but this is more tradition than perception (so as to pad the number to the requisite 7).

If you compare the typical representation of the rainbow, you'll see that it has the corresponding difference. Russian depiction of rainbow has pure medium-dark blue between sky blue and violet, and violet is dark:

http://nobacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Rainbow-26.png

(Note that blue in this pic is about as dark as it gets; quite often it's actually lighter - usually, sky blue and blue are closer together than blue and violet.)

English depiction of rainbow has some kind of really dark blue with a strong hint of violet in the same place, and violet is brighter:

http://weknowyourdreams.com/images/rainbow/rainbow-02.jpg

I learned English at a young age, and I still think of "red" and "pink" as fundamentally distinct. I think I was taught at some point that pink was "light red" but it seemed weird at the time (when I was a kid) and it never sank in viscerally. They still feel like distinct colors—just like "red" and "orange" are distinct.

I think this is really similar to the two blues in Russian. Interestingly, while I grew up speaking Russian, I learned English at a young-enough age that I actually find the distinction between the two blues a bit confusing at time—I know about it, obviously, but it actually feels less strong than the distinction between red and pink. But that's just me with my weird upbringing :).

Pink and red have different names in Russian too, pink is розовый.

Hm. I'd like to see them translate the dialog in Undertale, particularly about Papyrus' "Blue" attack.

In English we have blue and cyan, but the word cyan is rarely used except to distinguish from blue.

Cyan is not quite the same. Most Russian speakers would classify it as zeleno-goluboy, i.e. as a mixed hue between green and sky blue. It's right past the borderline where the amount of green in sky blue is enough that it stops being perceived as a pure color.

I think Hungarian has the same distinction with piros versus vörös: https://www.academia.edu/7375817/The_Hungarian_color_terms_p...

Indeed, Piros and vörös are completely distinct, and nobody who speaks Hungarian would have any doubt what colors they indicate; and it's generally obvious when looking at a reddish color whether you're talking about piros (a brighter red, as in Red Riding Hood) or vörös (a darker red, as in Red Wine).

For English speakers, in everyday usage both are just "red." English has more specific words for red but we don't use them much.

This is a great example of why context-free machine translation is impossible. If you were to translate "red wine" as piros bor (instead of vörösbor) it would be ridiculous.

Because "crimson", "magenta", "scarlet", "pink", etc are all the same color?

Red isn't a color, it's a spectrum. It encompasses a whole range of colors. You use it to describe a similar set of colors when specificity isn't required ("What was that red thing?" vs "I think it would look good in crimson"), like most things in English.

Did you read the article? The discussion is entirely about colour as a linguistic concept, not as a wavelength of reflected light.

Until a few hundred years ago, pink things were simple "light red" things in English (and many other languages) - we didn't have the word pink and so couldn't express the colour without using relative terms.

Did you read the comment I responded to? He was stating that English speakers would use "red" interchangeably, near invariably.

They don't. "Red" doesn't exist as a concept except abstractly. Words like "scarlet" and "teal" have been used since middle English to describe colors.

In other words: it's not that English works the way he described (it doesn't), but instead the inverse: Hungarian doesn't have an equivalent for "red".

That's not what they said at all. The example of red wine vs a bright red robe is a very valid one. You might become more specific when tasked with artistically describing the colour of a wine, but off the cuff you'd probably just use the word "red" for wine, blood (oxygenated or not), ink and sunsets in a way that wouldn't work in Hungarian.

The point is that in English, there's still a common word for, say, both "scarlet" and "crimson", grouping them together. But there's no such common word between "red" and "green" - the latter are primary colors, always distinguished.

In other languages, that grouping is done differently, and two colors that would both be appropriate to call "red" in English don't have a single common color term at all.

To get a feel of how this looks from the other side, consider various Asian languages that don't distinguish green and blue, and have a single word that has to be translated as "green or blue" to English.

Hebrew has "A-dom" for red, and "Bordo" (pronounced how a kid would misread a transliteration of Bordeaux, as in the red wines) for dark red.

We also have "Ka-chol" ("ch" pronounced like "phlegm" in "Achmad the Dead Terrorist") for blue and "Tche-let" for light blue, which are words you learn in kindergarten and use every day (you say "sky is Tche-let", never "sky is Ka-chol". When have you last heard someone describe a mid-day summer sky in English as anything but "blue"?)

Sure, we also have artist words for a thousand variations of blue: turquoise, aqua, aquamarine, etc'. In fact, just like in English, we use the French terms as is. But nobody learns them in kindergarten.

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