Comment by err4nt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by err4nt | Hacker News Reader

I can tell you right now you're going to have some trouble with those colours. They reduced the colours to five:

> Toki Pona has a five-color palette: loje (red), laso (blue), jelo (yellow), pimeja (black), and walo (white). Like a painter, the speaker can combine them to achieve any hue on the spectrum. Loje walo for pink. Laso jelo for green.

So, what's Toki Pona for cyan, which two colours would you combine to create that colour? (Blue = cyan + magenta)

Or how would you describe 'magenta' in Toki Pona? (Red = magenta + cyan)

See the problem with using Red, Yellow, Blue + Black, White is that Red and Blue are pre-mixed! You're cutting out two of the true primary colours (magenta, cyan) which means you're significantly reducing the amount of colours you can accurately describe.

On the other hand, still using just five words: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, and White CAN describe nearly all of the colours we would need to communicate with language.

I wonder if the rest of the language is as well thought out as the colours...

I think they drew their inspiration from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms

Once you get past the basic colors, there's only referential colors... So instead of <single word for a specific type of pink> you would say 'salmon'. In the Latin languages (French), pink is just 'rose'. You could also glue different concepts. For example, in (unofficial) Dutch, a word for cyan/turquoise is 'appelblauwzeegroen', or 'apple-blue-sea-green'.

'appelblauwzeegroen'? Never heard of it, in my 42 years of being a native speaker of Dutch. Not too many references on the web either, except for a hint that it might mean 'ugly, undefinable color' (so, not referential).

You must be a Netherlands-Dutch speaker then. It's an accepted word in Flanders. :>

Dutch, 22 years old, haven't heard of it either.

Even splitting it up, 'apple blue; sea green' does not make any sense to me. Well sea green, maybe a bit, but not really in combination with the rest. Since it's a composite word* you can't find it in a dictionary, so I can't really check whether it really exists.

* One word made out of multiple, like the English "car mechanic" would become "automonteur". Though automonteur is an example common enough to have its own entry: http://www.woorden.org/woord/automonteur

Edit: as per this comment[1], I've ran it past a Belgian guy: the word seems to be Flemish indeed. He knows it as "a color between green and blue".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9916562

You're talking about light mixing. The red/blue/yellow color wheel is based on pigment mixing: green + blue = cyan, red + blue = magenta

And blue + yellow = green. So cyan = blue + blue + yellow?

If (cyan + magenta) + yellow = green, how would (cyan + magenta) + (cyan + magenta) + yellow = just cyan?

To get cyan you simply remove the magenta from blue!

But there isn't a word for cyan and magenta, hence the need to define cyan in terms of RYB.

cyan = blue + green

green = blue + yellow

cyan = blue + (blue + yellow)

Well, technically:

2 parts cyan = 1 part blue + 1 part green

2 parts green = 1 part blue + 1 part yellow

2 parts cyan = 1 part blue + 1 part (1 part blue + 1 part yellow)

i.e.

2 parts cyan = 1 part blue + 1/2 part blue + 1/2 part yellow

i.e.

4 parts cyan = 3 parts blue + 1 part yellow

But I think the real lesson here is that colour names based on additive colour mixing are silly.

The original reply is actually correct. From Wikipedia: "For a subtractive combination of colors, as in mixing of pigments or dyes, such as in printing, the primaries normally used are magenta, yellow, and cyan,[1] though the set of red, yellow, and blue is popular among artists."

I also learned the RYB colors as primary colors, and find it much easier to reason about than CMY. That's probably also the reason why artists use it.

For the 'simple' language, I agree that RYB + white and black are enough.

Does your printer print with light? I'm able to print out a full rainbow from my printer and it uses Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow, with Black for added punch and printing text.

What's inside your printer?

What does it matter what your printer uses?

That's the only reason we're talking about CMYK, isn't it? The CMYK color space isn't a law of the universe, it's a printing technology.

I think you're posing the same problem as those who want to express precise mathematical numbers with the language - that's not the point.

I would assume that when faced with expressing cyan, you'd say something like laso walo (blue white).

My proposed list: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, and White was no longer than their list, it was no more difficult to understand than their list, and it is scientifically sound.

We have known for two centuries that the true primaries are Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (for pigment), why continue to propagate false primaries (red, yellow, blue) that omit the ability to describe entire sections of the spectrum? The language is no less specific.

Is there a difference between cyan and light blue? How about light cyan?

Cyan = cyan

light blue = (cyan + magenta) + white

light cyan = cyan + white

If you're starting with blue (cyan + magenta) you can't end up with only cyan and white by adding white to that. You have to remove the magenta.

Yellow is a true primary, but both Red and Blue are already mixes between primaries

While Yellow + Blue = Green, it's not as pure as the green made by cyan + yellow, because the blue + yellow green also includes magenta from the blue.

When it's easy to see that the true primaries are CMY, why continue to propagate a centuries-old colour model that doesn't adequately describe the colours we see around us.

I thought the point of this language was to break things down to their core, and combine ideas to come up with combintations. Yellow is fine, but both Blue and Red can be broken down further. There's still work to be done!

The CMYK color space is a color space that works well for printing technology, but there's no reason that has to have anything to do with language.

Most languages do not have a native word for "magenta" or "cyan". In fact, "cyan" is an unfamiliar word to most English speakers.

Also, if you made a language where all the colors were described in CMYK, how would you describe colors that are unprintable in CMYK such as lime green?

Plenty of human languages get by with a palette of dark/black, light/white, and red. It's likely that the only we have such a large palette of basic color terms is that we have a large dying/painting industry and can thus compare specific shades easily. Guy Deutscher has a great chapter on this in "Through the Language Glass". http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/

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