How “blue” and “green” appeared in a language that didn’t have words for them

it's a serious paper on a light hearted topic? or absolute nonsense but funny? I'm not certain if the Journal of Irreproducible Results has any standards about these things.

Rule 4 appears non-universal to me. Japanese historically developed ao (blue) before midori (green) which is still considered a shade of ao. I guess you could argue since the Japanese conception of ao includes both blues and greens that it fits, but it seems odd to me.

Honestly I see a lot of native english speakers struggle with the difference quite often. I drove an old constructio pickup for a while - very much yellow (even according to ford). Yet a very large number of people talked about my big orange truck.

Orange as a concept didn't arrive in Northern Europe until oranges, the fruit, were imported through (Moorish?) Spain. Chromatically, the space between red and yellow is a lot tighter than the space between yellow and blue. We don't really need a separate color name there, but we have one; it's a distinction that English speakers agree on. If you look at the Munsel color system, one of the first scientific, equidistant color systems, it goes from green, blue, purple, red, yellow, "skipping" orange as a distinct, named color.

Here's a useful one-liner to print the code for each of the 256 colors in their respective color, so that you can quickly see which one you want:

    for i in {0..255}; do  printf "\x1b[38;5;${i}mcolor%-5i\x1b[0m" $i ; if ! (( ($i + 1 ) % 8 )); then echo ; fi ; done

My 2.5 year old son has trouble telling apart blue and green eventhough our language considers them strictly separate colors, like English. Apparently it takes practice to learn them apart, and maybe it's even impossible if you need to learn it as an adult.

Yup, same in Korean. You’ll hear lots of adults say the blue grass or blue light (for traffic signals).

Maybe, although we use extra adjectives like Royal blue, sky blue, powder blue, navy blue, etc

That may get the color differentiation down well enough for regular people to use. Maybe not for blue experts though.

No. You can still see.

I used to spend time in a chat room where you could configure the background and foreground color of your text; I used blue on cyan.

Research shows that the way your native language divides colors does affect your ability to distinguish them. For example, a Russian speaker would more quickly and easily distinguish two similar shades if one is goluboy and one is siniy. However, with training, anyone with adequate color vision can learn to be as or more proficient.

Nah, those words are more like synonyms than two different colors / groups of colors. They aren't used consistently neither by the same group of people nor between different groups.

This is especially obvious when there's a need to give a precise name / definition (eg. when naming paints or objects with very distinctive color). For example, I've heard cyan translated as either one of those (I studied printing). And when it comes to paints, there's eg. "берлинская лазурь" (the name of a particular pigment and a paint that uses that pigment), which is typically described as голубая, but it's really dark.

In general, it seems that in languages with long history, there's very little in terms of consistency in how speakers name different colors. Meanings "drift" over time. Sometimes they "fork" because of the objects associated with the same color change that color (eg. egg yolk yellow). It's also influenced by availability of pigments and dyes and the companies who manufacture paints. Sometimes these keep labeling, but change the technology used to make paints. In particular, saturation seems to increase with technological advances, but names seems to remain the same.

This, of course, also depends on your audience. If you talk to an arts student or a painter, they will have a different idea about what colors are and how to name them. For instance, an art student would often deny that "white", "black", "brown" or "pink" designate colors -- from a perspective of someone trained in classical painting, these aren't really colors and don't help in describing what / how one should draw something. Similarly, from a perspective of someone who's tasked with painting walls, the division may be imposed by technical limitations (i.e. mixing paints from a particular manufacturer cannot produce a desired hue, if, eg. green paint is used, therefore the painter may believe that the color isn't a shade of green).

There's definitely a difference between "baby blue" and "navy blue."

No, in English there are many, many words for blue, some of which are only known by women and interior designers.

In english the amount of precision you use depends on the context and the shared referents. You could say "bud light blue" or 'greek blue' depending.

In France purple is not in the set. We have blue, white, red (obviously), black, yellow, green, gray. No orange, no purple, no brown - we of course know these colors but we would not use them when "dividing" colors into sets.

Computers, especially the sRGB colorspace is severely lacking in the green region. There are many colours that humans can sense that have no corresponding RGB value.

It is interesting that Newton eschewed purple for indigo and violet in the rainbow because he wanted it to have seven colors (it actually doesn't have discrete colors).

The idea here is not what words a language has names for, but what words a language considers "primary".

"Azure" is an English color-word, but an English speaker recognizes "azure" as a kind of "blue". But "blue" is not a kind of "green" or a kind of "purple" or a kind of anything else. Hence, "blue" is a basic English color-word.

Typical English dialects have eleven basic color words: white, gray, black, brown, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Other color-words in English are considered variants of one of these eleven terms. That wasn't always true ("pink" is the most recent addition, dating to the early 1700s), but it's pretty well-established by modern English speakers. Other languages may make fewer distinctions (e.g. until about the last century Japanese used ao(i) as a basic color word that encompassed both blue and green, so e.g. a traffic light is aoi by tradition even though the modern word for green is midori) or more (e.g. Russian distinguishes light blue goluboi and dark blue sinii similarly to how English distinguishes red and pink). To an old Japanese speaker, blue and green were both shades of ao, and to a modern Russian speaker, goluboi is as distinct from sinii as "red" is from "pink" in English (they are not both "shades of blue" any more than pink and red are "shades of reddish" in English).

[finite_depth says this much better than me in a parallel comment!]

I believe this is explicitly about how 'regular' speakers of languages agree on colours, and which are distinct.

For instance 'lime' can describe a colour - typically a light green. But most English speakers [citation needed] would consider it to be a shade a green, not a distinct colour.

Similarly, looking at this small colour chart of Pantone shades: https://www.wardrobeoxygen.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Pa... - if asked unprompted you probably wouldn't call the shades "Flame Scarlet", "Saffron", and "Chive", but Red, Yellow and Green.

There is a fairly involved definition of "basic color word" that goes into this research. Basically, most English speakers would agree that periwinkle is a shade of purple, but would certainly not say that green is a shade of blue. In this sense purple, green, and blue are basic color words but periwinkle is not.

> As an English speaker, this is just bizarre because we have so many words

TFIFY.

English has imported so many words...

Homer: the bronze sky and the wine-dark sea...

The Wine-dark Sea and Perception in the Ancient World

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hoffman_01_13/

In fact one of the Tsimane' words for green/blue is shandyes, which means leaf color.

That one gets yellow and red in autumn.

Roughly, (t)see-ma-nay or chi-ma-nay. The first sound is an affricate consonant, similar to the sounds spelled ch or j in English (e.g. the final sound of "catch" in General American). The last sound should properly be spelled é, not just e, and is similar to the sound spelled with that letter in French or the sound spelled "ay" in English words like "pray" (also in General American).

> How is one supposed to read “Tsimane’”?

Input this on Google Translate and reproduce the sound → つぃまね [1]

[1] https://translate.google.com/?sl=ja&tl=en&text=つぃまね