Completely different languages tend to group colors in roughly the same way | Hacker News Reader

Completely different languages tend to group colors in roughly the same way

hearingreview.com

55 pointsnelsondev23 comments

Fascinating. This builds on previous work in this area. There seems to be a hierarchy of distinction. Every language distinguishes black/white. Nearly every culture had bright red as a distinct colour term. yellow/blue/green usually too. Some distinguish blue/green clearly others have a default aquamarine and specifying "blue" or "green" is kind of like when we specify "navy blue" or "sky blue". (Light and dark blue are distinct basic colours for Russians.)

The article mentions this being around for a couple decades, but it's much further back than that. The groundwork was laid in the 1960s and even earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Unive... No single hypothesis on why. Is it innate to our cognition and our vision system? Or is it just a cultural trait, practically arising out of things like that red fruit are tasty so we talk about them a lot?

What I find most fascinating about Basic Color Terms is the regularity across cultures, worldviews and languages. If a language has 2 terms for color, they are always "light" and "dark". If it has 3 terms for color, the third term is always "red". If it has 4 terms for color, the fourth term is always "yellow" or "green". 5 terms, the language has both "yellow" and "green".

Yes, interesting. A lot of fruit is red and people see red, so there seems to be some link there. Many animals do not see red. Foliage is green (leafy plants), or maybe yellow (dried grasses) depending on area.

Or the red is for tracking the blood of a bleeding hunted animal. We don't have the nose so we'd have to do it by sight.

I find it interesting that the last terms in the hierarchy are pastels. If you have one basic pastel, it's grey. Two: you have grey and pink. Three: grey, pink, and robin's egg blue. Pastel brown, purple, and green are easy for the human eye to distinguish (yellow and orange less so), but they never make the cut.

Actually, I speaking a bit off the cuff. I don't recall where grey is in the hierarchy -- it's towards the end -- but the last two are pink and pastel blue.

Is it"always" it is it "usually" I thought there were a few exceptions to this grouping.

There's some apparent overlap here with the perceptual research I learned about when I did my cartography degree. When selecting colors for a map depicting a single continuous variable, red is universally perceived as "more." Almost any other color will have cultural significance that is highly variable.

> others have a default aquamarine and specifying "blue" or "green" is kind of like when we specify "navy blue" or "sky blue"

One specific example: the Vietnamese word "xanh" means "blue or green". If you want to be specific, you say (the equivalent of) "sky xanh" or "leaf xanh".

This comes from Chinese, where 青 can be both green or blue. Modern Chinese uses 绿 and 蓝 instead to distinguish the two, but Japan continues to use 青 ambiguously: eg aoshingō "blue traffic light" for what we would call a green light.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92

Ao isn't ambiguous in modern Japanese. It appears in various set phrases for things that aren't blue, but when used on its own to describe the color of something it just means blue.

I'm not sure the Vietnamese word comes from Chinese, even if the meaning is the same. Your link says that the Vietnamese word that's a cognate of the Chinese one is thanh not xanh.

Vietnamese is from a completely different language family to Chinese, although it's been influenced by Chinese over the centuries.

Xanh is also a cognate of the same character: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xanh

I stand corrected.

I guess they associated colors with object classes. Animals are red and plants are green. Some plants are also blue, like flowers, so blue is also a plant color, so if you have one word for plant color you get blue and green as the same. Not sure about yellow, is it associated with fire maybe?

> No single hypothesis on why.

No utility. Blue objects in the world: the sky, the sea, a handful of flowers, some very rare stones. Not edible, not usable in any other form.

The phenomenon can be directly observed in some languages where 'green' is synonymous with 'unripe'. Highly likely that the 'unripe' sense evolved first.

Also, the people most likely to discuss colors are artists and such. The thing with blue is that for a very long time pure blue pigments like aquamarine were extremely rare and expensive, quite likely non-existent at all in the times of basic vocabulary formation and associated development. You don't give names and fine distinctions to things you don't deal with often.

I had a paper in the Journal of Irreproducible Results many years ago that explained how languages developed Basic Color Terms to help sort laundry.

I'm on my phone so I can't get a better link than this other: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

There's common physiology for human colour perception: rods for brightness, cones for red-green-blue. Atop this are opponent colours: black-white, red-green, blue-yellow.

Right. Finding a difference in color language would be more surprising. At least it's good to know for certain.

The cones respond to multiple wavelengths, so it can not be so neatly discretized into “red-green-blue”. It’s more “red/orange/yellow-green-blue/purple”.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.htm...

> Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. - DNA

John McWhorter on Lexicon Valley has a great episode about this phenomenon.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/09/john-mcwhorter-on-t...

I remember reading Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte. It had some interesting insights into how humans categorize different things by colors and how that can be used when building info graphs.

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