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Comment by mr_pink | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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