Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com