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Comment by ThatCaio | Hacker News Reader

In English, pink and brown are very specific colors which the brains of native speakers might not associate with their true hue values.

That's why the original commenter was having difficulty finding brown, because we do not necessarily associate it with a dark orange or flesh color with de-saturated red or orange.

But if we were trying to paint something like dark teal water. The brain would immediately go straight to blues/greens.

These "color categories" that we form in our brains can be different in every culture or language. That is issue with what was suggested.

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> That's why you were having difficulty finding brown

Not sure if you’re replying to the right person? I didn’t say anything about finding brown being difficult.

I don't even know what that would mean for it to be difficult to find a colour?

> because you do not necessarily associate it with a dark orange

That’s what brown is - a dark orange. The same way navy is a dark blue. But nobody makes videos claiming that navy is a weird colour because it’s actually dark blue.

It sounds like the brown-orange link is intuitively obvious to you. But I think the claim being made is that for most native English-speakers, the link between orange and brown is significantly less obvious than that between X and dark X, for most colours X. FWIW that is true in my case.

(Not that I deny the link exists; but when I look at e.g. an orange next to a dark brown tree branch, I don't see them as versions of the same colour in the way I do with, say, a lime and a dark green leaf. That's not a great example but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.)

This seems like a simple case of different people finding different things unintuitive.

My theory is that many people have a mental model of colors that maps roughly to the hue and value in HSV, so for example terms like "dark orange" is a value followed by a hue. Now suppose you understand brown as a "dark beige", that's suddenly confusing because beige introduces saturation and you cannot map beige back to orange without thinking about saturation.

> Now suppose you understand brown as a "dark beige"

I think my point is brown is dark beige, and beige is light brown. Neither is canonical. Is orange canonical? Maybe it's high frequency red? Or low frequency yellow? That's what Newton thought! It's all relative.

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