Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language (2015)

nautil.us

48 pointsamaccuish53 comments

I know that authors do not choose the titles of their articles, but it was somewhat vexing that the question of "why 'red' means 'red' in almost every language" went entirely unaddressed.

Ah, but that wasn't the title, precisely. They weren't talking about 'red' (the word) at all, but rather red—the semantic concept that the English word 'red' points to. The mysterious assertion being followed up on is, in other words, not:

    en["red"] ≡ en["red"].translate(other_lang)

(i.e. "other languages also have a word 'red', that is the translation for the English word 'red'"), but rather:

    en["red"].referent ≡ en["red"].translate(other_lang).referent

(i.e. other languages have a word eqivalent in referent to the English word 'red'), or even:

    ∃other_lang, ∀color_word: en[colorWord].referent ≡ en[colorWord].translate(other_lang).referent

(i.e. there are other languages that share a complete set of color-words referents with English, such that you can bijectively map each English color-word to an equivalent color-word in that other language.)

...which is the topic of the body of the article.

But isn't

    en[x].referent ≡ en[x].translate(other_lang).referent

just the definition of translating x to other_lang?

The whole article is essentially about this not being the case, such that it's surprising when it is. To summarize: Not all translations can be to words whose referents are one-to-one mappings with referents in the source language, because not all cultures embodied by ethnolinguistic enclaves have the same "knowledge-base" of referents to attach words to.

There are languages (e.g. historical Japanese) with no single word meaning "blue" or "green", only a word meaning "blue-green." In my made-up notation, that'd be:

    en["blue"].referent ≭ en["blue"].translate(ja).referent

...and that's, to be clear, because:

    en["blue"] ≭ en["blue"].translate(ja).translate["en"]

Instead, you'd be able to make these assertions:

    en["blue"].referent ⊂ ja["青"].referent
    en["green"].referent ⊂ ja["青"].referent

    en["blue"] ⊂ ψ(ja["青"].translate(en)) 
    en["green"] ⊂ ψ(ja["青"].translate(en))

(i.e., the Japanese ao ('青') has a referent containing both the referents for the English 'blue' and 'green'; and translating 青 back into English gets you a word that's kind of "in superposition" between being English 'blue' and 'green'—a probability density function containing both possibilities—such that a translation AI—or a human—would likely be using context to decide what the correct translation of the word is.

That seems a bit hand-wavy to me. Firstly, that was precisely the title. You are talking about the meaning of the title. Secondly, I did understand the title, and I am not speaking of the word 'red'. I am speaking of the semantic category referred to by the word 'red' in English. Thirdly, it is clear from the article that not all semantic color categories match cleanly and bijectively across languages. Fourthly, the assertion that 'red' does match bijectively across "almost every language" is not made in the article, and no explanation of any reason for any such claim is given. Fifthly, there is no information in the article that affirms the why of any semantic matching (or mismatching) occurs across languages: a theory of biologically-based thresholds in retinal perception is mentioned, but as a hypothesis, not as useful science. The article merely discusses the history of the similarity (and dissimilarity) observed in a series of studies.

My point was that there was a difference between your quotation of the article's title, and the article's actual title. You put quote-marks around 'red'; the article itself did not. This is a use-mention distinction: when writers—but journalists especially—talk about (i.e. mention) words, they put them in quotation marks. When writers use them to refer to their referents, they don't.

This is important because news articles themselves get translated to other languages. Consider what the title of the article would be if the article were translated to another language. If they were attempting to mention the English word 'red', you'd still see the quoted English word 'red' in the translated title! Whereas, if they were attempting to refer to the semantic category, the title would just say, translated the destination language, "why [local red-equivalent color word] is [local red-equivalent color word] in every language."

My point was to clarify that you were making a very different argument by asserting that the article never clarified "why 'red' is 'red'..." than you'd make by asserting that the article never clarified "why red is red...".

> Fourthly, the assertion that 'red' does match bijectively across "almost every language"

Again, be careful: that's not the claim the article is making, but it is the claim you appear to be making by putting 'red' in quotes like that :) You have to be explicit when speaking of semiotics!

> Fifthly, there is no information in the article that affirms the why of any semantic matching (or mismatching) occurs across languages

Well, that's just moving the goalposts; nobody was claiming that the article backed up its claims. It's just one of an innumerable number of these science-journalism blurbs about the weird color-category finding. For another one, see: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/21121...

Okay, I had missed that. You're right, I did put quotes around 'red' (like that) and I can now see why that was a communications failure on my part. In truth, I had initially echoed the title with the single quotes around the 'red', and then gone back and put the whole phrase in double quotes while failing to remove the single quotes.

However, the article clarifies neither why "'red' is 'red' in almost every language," nor "Why Red Means Read in Almost Every Language," as you seem to agree while mysteriously somehow also disagreeing with me. It is true that the article does not claim that red (category) matches bijectively across "almost every language," but that is my entire point. It is the title that introduces the notion that "Red" will somehow feature prominently in the content of the article, which it does not. We could argue about whether or not bijectivity is implied by the title, but that would be irrelevant.

Regarding whether this is moving the goalposts, I rather disagree. It is the title that makes the claim that the why of anything at all will be addressed by the article. If it is moving the goalposts to point out that the article not only does not establish "Why Red Means Red" also lacks significant information about the "why" of anything, then it is surely moving the goalposts in the direction of the kicker.

You wrote to affirm that the true meaning of the article's title referred in a sufficient way to the actual topic of the article, contra my apparent complaint. I see that there was a misunderstanding involved, but that aside — right, the title was not referring to the word 'red' — I disagree and actually I don't see how you can sustain any such argument.

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

This is counterintuitive to me should this not be the other way around - that only categorically distinguishable colours have words describing them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

I'd say it should be rephrased as "could only name a color as categorically distinct from others" to make it more obvious. If you're asked if something is blue or red, then turquoise would definitely be described as blue, but green also. It's not that you wouldn't see the difference between sky and grass, it's just that you'd classify it all as a different shades of the same color, as it's closer to it than to say red. On the other hand yellow would probably be a shade of light red in that example. Once you're used to that palette you'd start simply ignoring the differences in shade for practical usages, like for instance Cambridge Blue is called blue, while to me it's really green.

The article is to a large extent about cause and effect, that the basic assumption is that the cause may be linguistic is odd to me.

How could it be something other than linguistic? Do you think it's genetic?

Well, biological.

You're suggesting koreans may be biologically different enough that they see more shades of green than everyone else?

Perception is trained, whether visual, auditory, etc. It's true that people who live next to the sea/ocean are trained to differentiate shades of blue and green much more than people who live in woody areas — shades of greens and yellows become much more sophisticated in such cases. Musicians tends to isolate sounds and timbers better (e.g. with a noisy background, or identifying precise instruments and effects in complex multi-instrumental pieces).

Painters are typically a bunch of good examples of our very subjective color perception.

So, language develops due to the environment it is in, which also affects people's perception? That still doesn't sound biological

human biology adapts to the environment and forms the basic primitive culture. technology for over 10,000 years rapidly mixed cultures and to a lesser extent biologies forming: languages, empires, religions, and ages. the technological process is far more efficient at shaping our cognition than the slower evolutionary one which works through intergenerational selection events. this is a cumulative runaway event which makes sense- given that human intellect is probably a bad mutation for long term fitness and survival, as humans wiped out all of the other humanlike species (and dangerous megafauna) which might have kept us in some ecological niche like the other animals. all living things head towards extinction, but our strategy is to burn up rather than fade away.

Language has nothing to do with biology except in the purest form of it resulting in different meat shapes in your brain. As far as I'm aware, there is absolutely 0 evidence that language can be inherited - anecdotally at least because both my parents can speak French and I can't.

specific languages are the result of history and territory. Language is an innate human capacity. the speed, breadth and depth of acquisition is measured relative to other humans. less methodical than athletics, art, music or mathematics- which are easier to measure. but definitely not as nebulous as influence, attraction, art or leadership- which are just now becoming measurable with proto artificial brains.

It makes sense to me. It matches my experience. I can't think of examples, sorry, but I do know there have been times I've learnt new categories by words (and of course an explanation of where they differed; the semantics of the words), suddenly distinctions became obvious that weren't before.

I wish I could recall examples, so this is just a vague statement of 'in my experience' but that linguistic distinction creates categories that allow easier 'recognition' of different concepts I'd lumped together before.

I think that a relevant example here would be categorizing "red" and " green" to a colour blind person.

I don't think so, as that categorisation can't be perceived by them. Like, they can't see it.

I'm saying that once 2 categories had been conceptually distinguished, I could split them apart immediately because the difference had been explain, whereas they were amorphously lumped together in my head before. Typically those categories had different words, but even without that the distinction became evident.

It's besides the point, but that's actually not how typical red-green colorblindness works.

We can see both red and green as separate colors, it's just much harder to distinguish them than it is for other people (especially if they are mixed in with other colors).

As far as I understand the physiology, our eyes are much less sensitive to green light, so it just doesn't stand out as much.

Very much on point, and I learned something. Ta.

Well I mean, obviously you can't "name a color as distinct" if your language doesn't have a distinct name for it. That doesn't mean it's perceptually indistinguishable.

I'm not sure why this tautology is regarded as such a big deal.

It's basically the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has long since been disproven, but the soft version is still kicking because it's much harder to disprove and part of it is necessarily true (but I think it's mostly tautological).

Don't know if that's in the article, sorry if I'm just repeating stuff.

Even if you don’t have a different word for green and blue, one could certainly express the idea of a blue that is like a leaf rather than the sky.

You’d assume so, but this is in fact false. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_la...

As far as I can tell all that articles says is that there are languages that use a single term for green/blue, not that speakers of those languages are incapable of identifying the difference between the colour of a leaf and the color of the sky. I can distinguish between the colour of the sky and the colour of blueberries (and treat them as categories of colours) even if I use the same word "blue" for both.

That doesn't really support your contention. The color naming debate underlying the entire discussion is primarily focused on basic color terminology, for which colors that are merely allusions to a physical object (e.g., turquoise, gold, lavender) are excluded. But that doesn't tell you what terminology people will actually reach for in description. Japanese, for example, uses "ao" to refer to essentially the entire blue/green spectrum, but "midori" (lit. "leaf") is used to green, increasingly to the exclusion of "ao" in modern Japanese (side note: this is literally an example, explicitly mentioned in your reference, of what the GP is suggesting happens).

It seems obvious, but could have profound consequences on how you logically group things together. Most of us thinks verbally and if it has no distinct name you don't think of it as a distinct entity, so our perception would just box it with all other shades. You don't go around thinking this spot of grass is so Chartreuse green, and that over there is more Shamrock green - it's all one entity for you, "the green stuff". Now, of course, unless we talk about the color of skin, how you group colors probably doesn't create a huge practical differences for us now, but it has certainly influenced our perception of the world.

This approach is rooted in the theory that language is not “representative” of the world, but significantly constitutive of it. In this view, language is not something that mechanically “points to” things, but is the system through which consciousness develops and allows us to reason about sense-impressions in a way that is uniquely human (or at least sapient). Pragmatically, sense-impressions are organized into “things we can talk about” and, having named them, we now use those names and concepts to organize the world we perceive. The flip side is that we’re less likely to develop new names for and new reason-abouts things if they comfortably fit within our existing nominal categories, unless we have good practical reason to do so. Thus a visual designer will have a great many names for gradations in color that a non-designer might not be able to reason about (“It’s all just blue, right?”), because he or she has a practical need to distinguish colors and think about them at a much finer level of granularity. This also has the interesting derivation that societies can only reason about what they can talk about, which has profound implications for how inter-group communicative discourse works — from politics to intra-corporate coordination to literature. If you’re interested in this, I’d recommend any synoptic overview of Pragmatic and New Pragmatic thought, and the linguistic work of Searle.

mandatory mention of hungarian, where "red" does not really exist, and in its place there are two different words, roughly equivalent to "dark red" (wine or blood is vörös) and "light red" (fire or apples would be piros).

I am not sure if it's saturation or light or hue difference or whatever, and I can't really tell the difference, but I would quote the example I received first: "it's normal for someone to have vörös hair, but someone with piros hair would likely be a punk".

I'm Hungarian and it's hard to describe the difference. Your examples are good indeed, before wine, blood and red carpet we exclusively use 'vörös', as well as for red headed people, but I'm not sure it is because a different colour (bit darker, saturated red. We also (in a slightly literatury way) say vérvörös, blood-red coloured, I think that's the colour I would associate the word with) or simply because they are almost fixed prefixes.

We also use 'bordó', to mean an even darker red (though for my not particularly "trained" eyes they are practically the same as vörös)

I think it is hard to imagine that evolution did not result in some hard-wiring of our reactions to the sight of blood.

Blood=violence, LOOK OUT!

Except for the half of humanity who bleed regularly without any violence to look out for.

Surprisingly, there indeed seems to be no hard-wired understanding of periods. Freaking out on your first one is common for unwarned young women. Dealing with this has been off-loaded to culture.

And the various idiocies in traditional cultures about how to deal with menstruating women show that freaking out about this has been pretty common through history.

Well, red in nature doesn't always need to mean blood. It can also be a signal to other animals, even if they don't have red blood. Red is pretty hard to camouflage in nature, and it really stands out.

Sometimes it's for attracting, such as red apples, fruit/berries, or flowers. By attracting other animals, it helps the signaler.

Sometimes it's to signal danger, as in red poisonous mushrooms, or animals that have red bodies and are toxic or don't taste good. ("don't eat me")

I guess what I'm saying is that red was a signal long before humans came on the scene, and I think we are still on the look out for it because of those same evolutionary clues.

False positives are not a big deal for this trait.

False negatives are.

A spat of blood may not mean danger, but if it systematically put you on your guards, you are likely to get an advantages over individuals who are oblivious to it.

>Blood=violence, LOOK OUT!

Not necessarily violence, as yorwba pointed out, but the presence of some disruption or injury in the body that's producing the blood.

> When shown a wheel of similarly colored squares, people identify the offbeat shade more quickly if it comes from a different color category (as shown in the wheel on the left) than if it comes from the same category (as shown on the right). This effect suggests that the words we use to describe colors influences how we perceive them.

Or much more obviously that we name colours based on how we perceive them?

How do we know we all see same red color ?

As a kid I used to entertain myself with the thought that we don't, we just agree on the names. Even in the hypothetical simple case of RGB perceived as GBR I would still learn to name G as R.

Long form articles like this ought to contain summery!

infants were quicker to recognize a color from a new category if it appeared in their left visual field, which sends inputs to the right hemisphere of the brain. Adults, on the other hand, were quicker to recognize a new color category if it appeared in their right visual field, which corresponds to the left hemisphere, where the language centers reside.

Ok how does that translate to everyone saying red for the color? I’m confused as to what they’re trying to communicate from the title.

The title doesn't mean that the English word "red" means red in almost every language.

It means that the word people would use to describe what we would call red in each language means pretty much the same range of colors (which isn't true for other colors).

Colours don't translate nicely across languages.

Sometimes, blue and green are different shades of the same colour, sometimes light blue and dark blue are two different colours, some languages consider pink to just be lighter red etc.

So, the title claims that the colour red is always red, regardless of the language.

> sometimes light blue and dark blue are two different colours

I believe it's so in russian

> some languages consider pink to just be lighter red

This is interesting. Here in the UK pink is generally described and accepted as light red, but I've always considered it to be a separate colour, and I met someone who mentioned he though the same, so it's not just me.

There's light red but to my eyes that is qualitatively different to this https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/shock...

Any other views? Perhaps someone with knowledge of chromatics can better resolve the question.

thanks

You’re articulating the difference between “pink” (a red tint, i.e. red mixed with white) and “hot pink” or “magenta”, the fully-saturated midpoint between red and purple.

Well that's interesting. I can see that now.

But looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_pink it appears to lump your magenta (red/purple) into the same category as red/white. So really we've got 2 categories with the same name of 'pink'? 2 different things?

Here’s a more comprehensive, if somewhat convoluted, explanation: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-pink-an...

“Pink and magenta have the same hue. What distinction there is to be found between magenta and pink lies along other axes than that of hue [i.e. saturation and value]. All pinks are magenta and all magentas are purple, and by extension, pink is a purple. However, it does not work the other direction: it does not mean that all purples are magenta nor that all magentas are pink, let alone that all purples are pink.”

(Visit the link for a more detailed picture of the differences)

I think the title is pretty self explanatory as to the questiom the article intends to investigate; and if it summarised the findings it might undermine the readers motivation to read further.

> wrangled pre-linguistic babies

I don't know why I love this wording, but I do.

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