[HN Gopher] Completely different languages tend to group colors ...
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       Completely different languages tend to group colors in roughly the
       same way
        
       Author : nelsondev
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2021-10-02 18:01 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.hearingreview.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.hearingreview.com)
        
       | hyperpallium2 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | retrac wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | _moof wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | hihihihi1234 wrote:
         | > 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".
        
         | Jensson wrote:
         | 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?
        
         | rendall wrote:
         | 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".
        
           | R0b0t1 wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | Jensson wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | DFHippie wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | kens wrote:
       | 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:/...
        
       | molly0 wrote:
       | 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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       (page generated 2021-10-02 23:00 UTC)