but when you ask a non-specialist[1] "what color is this", pointing to a scarlet object, they'll say "red". They will also take longer to tell the difference between turquoise and blue than between proper green and blue, where (I think it was) Thai-speakers wouldn't[2] (who have a primary-colour word for turquoise).

[1] specialist = (color-theorist, decorator)

[2] http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full actually, this article seems to talk about Russian, I'm getting the Thai thing from a discussion I remember (a video by the authors at the Long Now foundation[3].)

[3] http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/26/how-language-shapes...

I've seen somewhere a test for how many color words are there in the language - only color-words which do not correspond to a specific material or plant which color is emulated are accepted. So “red” or “blue” is fine, as is “piros” or “vörös” - but “sky blue” (color of sky), “ruby” (color of the gemstone) or “scarlet” (color of the Scarlet cloth) are not.

in english/italian etc.. I can say that magenta and scarlet are both kinds of red, but there is nothing above the hungarian voros & piros, you can only say they are both colors.

The "blue" and "indigo" in "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain" are just two shades of blue in Russian, more like "light blue" (голубой) and "dark blue" (синий).

Not only Russians. I believe it's the other way around - in English you have the same name "blue" for two colors that exist in quite few languages.

синий: http://yandex.ua/yandsearch?text=%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0...

голубой: http://yandex.ua/yandsearch?text=%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%83%D0...

It was a bit of mind-blowing to learn that English world for #0000ff is "blue" and then suddenly "The sky is blue" (what?! no it isn't #0000ff)

The same thing goes for redheads - what? but this is not red!