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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

I speak multiple languages including Russian. I think I discriminate between more colors, just because for a particular color shade chances are one of the languages has different adjectives.

Because I distinguish between light blue and blue, I'd keep calling something "light blue" even when people in my extended family who don't speak Russian will start saying "this is green now". Sometimes we have silly arguments about that which is fun.

Another one I like is the color between yellow and green. Russian has the word "salatoviy" (салатовый) translated as "salad green". I always see it that way even when not thinking or speaking Russian and I'd tell people something is "salad green" and they'd respond with "huh? oh you mean yellow..."

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I'm a native English speaker, I was learning Russian while dating a native Russian speaker. One of the lighthearted arguments we got into was whether a particular towel was green or blue. Color is a really easy-to-illustrate example of linguistic axioms differing across languages.

It's very believable that language plays a role. However, such arguments happen between people with the same mother tongue. So those color axioms could be defined on a community, or even a family level. Within a population speaking one language (and having a uniform education likely plays a big role) a particular axiom probably has better chances to become more or less dominant, but still differences are apparently more complex than language -> color.

You're totally right, this was a formative anecdotal experience for me but honestly there's absolutely no control for the experiment. I'm sure I've had the blue vs. green disagreement with non Russian speakers and discarded it. If it weren't already topical (I'm sure we were exploring синий versus голубой) I may not have considered the blue/green towel memorable.

> color between yellow and green

In English this is often called chartreuse or pear. (Ignore the web/CSS color “chartreuse” which is hilariously terrible, like pretty much all of the named web colors.)

> In English this is often called chartreuse or pear.

Although I know what both of these objects are, and think it seems like an accurate descriptor, I have honestly never once heard those used as colors (so I'd hesitate to say "often"). Wikipedia agrees on this usage though, so maybe it's just me who hasn't heard it...

Huh, I never knew "chartreuse" was anything _but_ a color. I agree with you about "pear", though.

A very unique liqueur, if you're into that sort of thing!

interesting. in Japanese you cross the traffic light when it's "blue" https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/02/25/language/the-ja...

I recall hearing "Ao" was used for both blue and green until recently. "Midori" was used later on as meaning only green. I think it has something to do with plant colors.

Interesting also when words stay the same between languages, but actual colour differ. Yellow / yelbrim (yellow/green)

I actually heard a lot of silly arguments between people who all have the same native language about orange vs red vs pink, or where is the border between blue and green. So not so sure it's about language, or culture.

> Russian has the word "salatoviy" (салатовый) translated as "salad green"

And English has "mint green" and "lime green", "sea foam green" "neon green" all representing different variants of green. For blue we have aqua, royal blue, periwinkle, powder blue, baby blue etc.

I would guess most languages with a few million speakers have words for a lot of colors. But I think the argument here is that "baby blue" or "sky blue" is not one of English's "base" colors, but is rather within the classification "blue". The difference is subtle, but it's captured in the test mentioned in the article: if I switch from navy to baby blue, and English speaker might clock both as blue. But for a Russian speaker, these would clock as different colors entirely. I believe a similar thing would happen for blue and green between an English speaker and a Japanese speaker.

The perceptual difference is microscopic, and I certainly wouldn't take it as far as the statement in the headline, but it does seem like the difference is there.

The example from the article was better than the comment I was responding to, which used the sample "salad green".

* Russian has two words, goluboy for light blue and siniy for dark blue.

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