[HN Gopher] Sunlight affects whether languages have a word for '...
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Sunlight affects whether languages have a word for 'blue'
Author : rbanffy
Score : 92 points
Date : 2021-10-04 11:20 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| wirthjason wrote:
| > Languages treat this spectrum in different ways: Some have
| separate words for "green" and "blue," others lump the two
| together. Some barely bother with color terms at all.
|
| Although not mentioned in the article, in Japan the the street
| light for go is "blue light" (Qing Xin Hao ) while in the US it's
| a "green light" despite being virtually identical in color.
|
| I'm not sure how this came to be but it's s fun to dispute
| amongst international friends (particularly while drinking).
| hoseja wrote:
| Doesn't Japanese have two words for green, one modern and one
| old, before the blue-green distinction?
|
| It does: _midori_ (Lu ) and _ao_ (Qing )
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ao_(color)#Ao_versus_midori
| wirthjason wrote:
| They also say the English "green", as pointed out in the Wiki
| article. So there's 3. :)
|
| In most context ao is definitely blue. It's not green at all.
| The color of the sky is blue. Blue as green shows up in a few
| spots, the city/prefecture Aomori, the blew Forrest, or
| aotogarashi, the blue chili pepper (which is like a mini
| Serrano). I'm not an expert on the language but I'm sure
| there's a bunch more.
| shagie wrote:
| The color of unripe bananas Qing i (Aoi).
|
| A "greenhorn" or other inexperienced person is also Aoi.
|
| A youth / person in the springtime of their life is Qing
| Chun .
| skhr0680 wrote:
| > A "greenhorn" or other inexperienced person is also
| Aoi.
|
| The etymology of that is different though. In Japanese
| it's because babies have a blue spot on their ass.
| TheFreim wrote:
| > Japan the the street light for go is "blue light" (Qing Xin
| Hao
|
| I love these sorts of things. Language fascinates me so much, I
| hope to learn more about linguistics some day.
|
| > particularly while drinking
|
| Hopefully not while driving through blue green lights!
| wirthjason wrote:
| Language is fascinating. I've found it interesting that two
| different cultures can have the exact same idioms. For
| example in English I say "goosebumps" while in Japanese it's
| exact same, tori-hara (Niao Ji ) or chicken skin. Both
| cultures map the concept to a bird's skin.
|
| On a separate linguistic note, you'd probably really love the
| book "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff. It's all about
| how languages have the power to hide and highlight. It blew
| my mind when I first read it.
| elliekelly wrote:
| One of my favorite wikipedia articles is "Cross-Linguistic
| Onomatopoeias"[1] because it's fun to look at the
| similarities and differences. An article of cross-
| linguistic idioms would be even more interesting! But
| probably much more difficult to compile.
|
| [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-
| linguistic_onomatopoei...
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| Cross-linguistic idioms would be interesting to see. I
| suspect it has a lot more to do with the etymology of the
| idioms than anything else. For example, I know that the
| idiom "I'm a big boy" (meaning "I am capable") works in
| English and Russian, but in Turkish it comes out sounding
| more like "I'm a large child". Actually, I found lots of
| idioms are identical in English/Russian (there are some
| unique ones to each language), and I suspect it comes
| from a shared European ancestry.
| bluGill wrote:
| As a color blind person I go when the light is blue. I don't
| see green well, so most stoplights get a blue tint to help
| people like me see the color better.
|
| Most stoplights - it was a shock to me driving one dark night
| when one of those white lights in front of me suddenly changed
| to yellow. It didn't have any blue tint, and there was no other
| indication that I was at an intersection as opposed to just a
| badly aimed street light. (I has never driven that road before,
| so I didn't have any other clue)
| grey_earthling wrote:
| Wikipedia reckons that the "go" light was originally blue. The
| colour became green to match the international convention, but
| the name didn't change.
|
| => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light#Variations
| 1auralynn wrote:
| Also, in the US lights used to be a pure green but were
| updated to be a blue-green so that color blind people could
| differentiate the green from red. You can still see the
| original green in some super old lights that haven't been
| updated.
| skhr0680 wrote:
| Qing encompassed both blue and green until the Meiji era, even
| now there are plenty of common words that use "ao" in place of
| "Midori" See: Qing Cai , Qing ringo, etc.
|
| At one point the traffic law referred to Lu Se traffic lights,
| but was updated to Qing Se post-war in the 1940s. It still
| means ao (green) not ao (blue).
| stooliepidgin wrote:
| It is very difficult/impossible to focus on blue images because
| the focal plane of the eye and blue cones (2% of cones) are out
| of alignment.
|
| https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/30600/why-cant-t...
| treeman79 wrote:
| I sometimes use prism glasses.
|
| Terminal drives me nuts because red text appears to be floating
| behind everything else. Blue text is similar. Is incredibly
| distracting.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| Huh, I was told that night vision would get worse after LASIK,
| but the main thing I found was that blue signs, particularly
| white text on a lit blue background, is illegible for me at
| night. Maybe all I was actually noticing is ordinary human
| limitations.
| stooliepidgin wrote:
| White text on a blue background are what we used for
| Wordperfect for DOS in the ye olden days specifically because
| the white popped out of the background. If this is
| paradoxically worse, then maybe there is an actual problem.
| But I would look at white console text on a blue background
| on a computer monitor first before reaching any conclusion.
| stooliepidgin wrote:
| Maybe related: Why do "red" products (i.e., dyes, paints,
| markers, pencils, pens) from China appear red-orange? Does it
| have something to do with language?
| stan_rogers wrote:
| In English, generic "red" used to mean something very close to
| orange (thus red hair, red-breasted robins, etc.). Blood red or
| rose red were usually called out. These days, outside of colour
| spaces, we distinguish between crimson (cold/bluish) and
| scarlet (warm/orangish) when it actually matters, and the
| default "red" is somewhere in the middle, probably because we
| added orange to the lexicon.
| stooliepidgin wrote:
| You're conflating a range of colors with a single color.
|
| "In the middle" is red. Red is red. It's not red-orange. It's
| not red-blue.
| svachalek wrote:
| This reminds me a lot of "I don't have an accent! YOU have
| an accent!"
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They're imitating the color of cinnabar lacquerware.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Some languages have more than one word for blue, like Russian
| where sky blue and deep blue are separate:
| https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2016/09/10...
| rimliu wrote:
| In Lithuanian we also have "melynas" for blue, and "zydras" for
| light blue. They both are commonly used to describe the sky.
| Curiously enough, our neighbours Latvians have "melnais" which
| looks similar to our "melynas", but actually means "black".
| memsom wrote:
| Ooh that is cool. If you look at the etymology, it seems like
| the word meant both black _and_ blue at some point and became
| fixed to one of the colours in each Baltic language, just not
| the same colour. So, despise it seeming odd, there is a sane
| explanation, and it is technically the same word as the words
| are cognates.
| bonzini wrote:
| That seems to be the same Indo-European root found in Greek
| melas or nowadays "melanin", meaning dark.
| bitwize wrote:
| Ah, "blue didn't exist until it was named". Top-notch Hackernews
| science, right up there with "the cure for everything is
| fasting".
| HuangYuSan wrote:
| First sentence: "Color is a spectrum: Red fades from orange to
| yellow, whereas green merges to turquoise, then blue." Not
| true... Or where is brown on this spectrum?
| silisili wrote:
| How isn't it true? They're just describing a prism/rainbow in
| basic terms.
| Cerium wrote:
| Browns are dark oranges. The only color you won't find in the
| spectrum is purple, which is the combination of red and violet.
| Take a look at the "CIE color diagram", all the colors on the
| perimeter of the curved line are single wavelength colors. The
| straight line at the bottom requires a combination.
| thih9 wrote:
| Related:
|
| - Hue Color Comparisons: https://uwdata.github.io/color-naming-
| in-different-languages...
|
| - There Is No "Blue" in Korean: https://medium.com/hci-design-at-
| uw/there-is-no-blue-in-kore...
| Gravityloss wrote:
| "there is no Blue in Korean" title is very misleading. As is
| written in the fine article, they certainly have a different
| word for what in English is commonly called red, blue, and
| green. It's not lumped together for example so that blue and
| green would be the same word in Korean.
|
| The interactive color maps are excellent.
| andrewzah wrote:
| There is pureuda which can refer to green or blue.
| Specifically "malgeun gaeul haneulina gipeun bada,
| singsinghan pulyi bicggalgwa gati balggo seonmyeonghada".
|
| I have no idea what's up with that article title though.
| Clearly there is parahda/paransaeg etc? Edit: the title
| should be "languages don't map colors exactly the same and
| can have more or less words for a color" would be a better
| title. But I think most people already know that.
| shagie wrote:
| https://theconversation.com/languages-dont-all-have-the-
| same...
|
| And various versions of the article
|
| https://npg.si.edu/object/posts_d6c837d227c59da175620b8eaa1
| 8...
|
| https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/pmc5635863
|
| https://www.pnas.org/content/114/40/10785/tab-article-info
|
| The essence of it is "how consistent are our names for
| colors?" Given an image if I point to this image and ask
| you the color for the N4 spot - what do you say?
|
| https://images.theconversation.com/files/186280/original/fi
| l...
|
| I'm going to say "Blue". How many other people (who speak
| English natively) answer it the same?
|
| Aside: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-
| results/ is also rather interesting in that domain.
| kevingadd wrote:
| IIRC, Qing in Japanese also can refer to either blue or
| green, though they also have a dedicated word for green (Lu
| ) and that is the one that usually gets used... this can
| catch people unawares when translating though.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Japanese traffic lights also have the colors red (Chi ),
| yellow (Huang ) and "blue" (Qing ), where the last one is
| really somewhere between blue and green.
| andrewzah wrote:
| It's interesting that pureuda (blue/green) uses a very
| similar character: Qing , with Qing listed as a variant.
| Red is the same, Chi (bulgeul jeog) and yellow (nureul
| hwang / hwangsaeg) uses Huang /Huang .
|
| Green (nogsaeg) uses Lu . There's also corog which is Cao
| Lu .
|
| Chi : https://hanja.dict.naver.com/#/entry/ccko/ad2ad1893
| b5c49f8ab...
|
| Huang : https://hanja.dict.naver.com/#/entry/ccko/17a2b69
| 699474d5bb8...
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Hangul also has the trait that green traffic lights are
| considered "blue". Really made my head spin as a kid.
| lvass wrote:
| Finally I have data to back up my suspicion people use terms
| like "teal", specially for blue, purple, pink and green hues,
| almost randomly. It's even worse in Portuguese.
| herf wrote:
| This "lens brunescence" theory is very odd and likely wrong: lens
| yellowing does not impact the ability to distinguish blue from
| green under even modest illumination levels. While it's a
| substantial effect by age 90 [1], it would be also be strange to
| assume that 90 year olds are responsible for all of language.
|
| In mammals, the primary opponent color channel is along the B-Y
| axis (comparisons between the S-cone to the M-cone), so many
| mammals are dichromats, and tritanopia is quite rare. Color
| adaptation is also quite effective along this axis, which means
| people adapt to changes in yellow vs. blue quite readily, seeing
| a wide range of colors as "white".
|
| Here's an alternate hypothesis: more daylight gives more days
| with a "blue sky" (instead of an overcast one), and so people in
| sunny climates would be much more likely to need a word to
| describe what they see.
|
| 1. For lens yellowing, see
| https://people.brandeis.edu/~sekuler/SensoryProcessesMateria...
| for an illustration.
| tgv wrote:
| Better title: in a post-hoc test on non-generalizable data,
| multiple environmental factors were found to correlate with the
| presence of a word for "blue" in a language, one of which was
| proximity to the equator. More speculation at 11.
| tralarpa wrote:
| "We do so on a large dataset of 142 populations". LOL. 56% of
| them in Eurasia.
|
| Unexplained correlation with population size.
|
| No explanation what "dedicated word for blue" means.
|
| No discussion of language evolution (was the word recently
| acquired, e.g., through borrowing; this is briefly mentioned in
| the text).
|
| High quality paper.
| diamondap wrote:
| There's a fascinating podcast (with transcript) at
| https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/21121...
| about linguistic studies that show blue to be the last color
| named in virtually all languages. There was no blue in the
| Odyssey or the Iliad because the Greeks didn't have a word for it
| yet. It appeared a few centuries later. Same in other languages
| around the world. Centuries of writing with no reference to the
| color blue, and then one day it appears. The podcast is a good
| listen.
| robotomir wrote:
| This thing again. I think all the misunderstanding starts from
| this one person misinterpreting Homer's "wine-dark sea" to mean
| blue. No. It means on the deep black sea.
| wazoox wrote:
| In my own interpretation, Homer refers to the colour of red
| wine as you can see in a black earthenware cup of the sort
| that was common in ancient Greece, or a bronze crater, both
| very dark, and actually not so different from the colour of
| seawater as seen from a boat offshore (not exactly black, but
| not really coloured either).
| Hamuko wrote:
| I thought that the word "orange" was way newer than "blue".
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| On a couple occasions, two different cis women said that I must
| be slightly colorblind because I was assigned male at birth and
| we disagreed on whether a color (on a physical object we were
| both looking at) was more blue or more green.
|
| (As far as I can tell, I am not even slightly colorblind.)
|
| I really want this linguistics thing to be known, because I
| think it's a sufficient explanation that _people just name
| colors differently and that's fine._
| executesorder66 wrote:
| My wife and I disagreed over whether our duvet was blue or
| green. I was adamant that it's green, and she that it is
| blue. (we both agreed it was a blue-green, but if we had to
| pick which colour was more prominent)
|
| So I took a photo and looked up the RGB values of the pixels
| to see if it was more green or blue. Turned out it was
| basically equal values for both. I found that very
| interesting.
| jedberg wrote:
| It's fairly well established that eyes of males (sex not
| gender) are not as good at distinguishing blue vs green as
| female eyes. If you were born male, your eyes most likely
| can't see blue and green as well as your friends who were
| born female.
|
| That's why you hear all those stories about men arguing with
| their wives about blue vs. green.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's fairly well established that eyes of males (sex not
| gender) are not as good at distinguishing blue vs green as
| female eyes.
|
| No, its not.
|
| It is, on the other hand, well-established that, on
| average, female _brains_ are better at distinguishing
| shades within and between "blue" and "green " (and, really,
| fine distinctions in colors in general) than male _brains_
| are on average. (Similarly, male _brains_ are better at
| perceiving distinctions in brightness than female
| _brains_.)
| jedberg wrote:
| Eyes are part of the brain, are they not?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Male is your sex, not your gender, so couldn't you just say
| "I'm male" instead of irrelevant details about "cis" women?
| nicoburns wrote:
| Some people use male to refer to gender these days.
| perl4ever wrote:
| It provides context for why the opinions might be biased,
| even if they were genuine and independent.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That is getting out of topic fast, but have you checked for
| blue/green color blindness? This one is not widely tested,
| come in several different forms, and the most usual "symptom"
| is that you disagree with everybody about colors being more
| blueish, greenish, purpleish and etc.
|
| It also doesn't impact much one's life... unless you have to
| read resistor values every day.
| perl4ever wrote:
| I googled for relevant tests and found colorlitelens.com.
|
| They may not be trustworthy as they are selling something.
|
| However, I took some of the tests (I've never been
| diagnosed with color blindness by a medical professional)
| and the results were interesting.
|
| The first couple of tests show a partial ring in a
| different background, like a rotated "C" and ask you to
| click on the gap as the contrast gets fainter.
|
| The red-green gap test was easy for me, and I got 100%.
|
| The "Tritan (Blue)" test which might be the relevant one to
| what you are talking about, was difficult, and it said I
| was "severely" deficient.
|
| However, after you take that test, it shows two spectrums
| and says if you are color blind in this sense they should
| look the same. They look very different to me, no question.
|
| So then I looked further and saw there is another test for
| the same type of deficiency, which is called the "mosaic"
| test, I think, where there is a small square made up of a
| few "tiles" that is a different color and you have to click
| on it. This one I got mostly right, and it ended up saying
| I was "slightly" deficient.
|
| It occurs to me, that with LED lights everywhere, and the
| LED screens on phones, the color deficiency in online tests
| could be coming from a compromised spectrum of light, not
| from one's eyesight.
|
| I don't quite understand how disagreeing about what to call
| colors on the spectrum from blue to green can be a
| deficiency. A rose by any other name... If you can
| differentiate between colors that are more blue and ones
| that are more green, then what significance is a label?
|
| As I say, lighting is important not to overlook.
|
| My first car was basically turquoise, and I tended to think
| of it as blue or blue-green. Other people did call it
| green, but for me, there was nuance due to seeing it under
| many different settings. Under sodium lights, it would look
| quite blue and not green, and unpleasant to my eye. Under
| indirect sunlight, it would be blue-green and jewel like.
|
| For reference, while it was a Honda color from many years
| ago that isn't easy to find good pictures of now, pictures
| from a GIS for "bmw atlantis blue" show cars that look like
| exactly the same color to me.
|
| On the other hand "porsche lizard green" does not look blue
| to me in the least.
|
| "Jade green" seems to me predictably a blue-green color
| that is greener than turquoise, but still perceptibly
| bluish.
|
| Colors called "chartreuse" generally look to me like green
| with a hint of yellow.
| svachalek wrote:
| Hmm I got a "normal" result on the tritan test (although
| the last one was quite difficult) but the two spectrums
| looked exactly the same! I don't really trust this too
| much. Particularly since it's highly dependent on what
| screen you view it on.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If I read it right, if you take the test, the two spectra
| should always look almost exactly the same to you. If you
| passed, it should look the same for everybody else too
| (because they are the same). If you didn't pass, somebody
| else should be able to see a difference.
|
| If they don't look the same to you, it's because
| something got wrong on the test, and you should discard
| the result.
| missblit wrote:
| The spectrum it generates is based on your test result,
| so if you get a "passing" score the two images are
| identical (I verified in an image editor that they're
| functionally identical)
|
| For comparison here's what an "almost passing" image
| looks like:
| https://www.colorlitelens.com/images/test/T1.jpg -- the
| blue section should look a bit darker on the bottom
| spectrum, and it's a bit more "pastel" in general (but
| yeah, monitors can confound this a lot).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Oh, no, disagreeing how to call colors is not a
| deficiency. But there is a deficiency that causes
| disagreement on how to call colors (or, well, maybe
| "deficiency" isn't even the right name, because it
| doesn't impact your daily live.).
|
| I can attest that those kinds of tests work well even on
| a screen, maybe not this one (I failed it in
| approximately the same way I fail every one, so it
| probably does). If you are in doubt, just show the test
| (or that color spectrum at the last page) to another
| person and ask if they can solve it. It is really
| disconcerting discovering that you don't see colors that
| everybody else does, and doubting the test is the
| reaction that nearly everybody has.
|
| Anyway, it may be the case that you just see different
| colors. I know I can see some UV light that most people
| can't.
|
| (Oh, and if the spectra looked different, that probably
| means you made mistakes in the test, getting an error on
| some image that you could see.)
| Aengeuad wrote:
| It's not that languages develop a word for blue last, but that
| there's usually a specific order in which terms for colour
| enter languages. It's roughly as follows: all languages have
| words for white/black, if they have 3 terms for colour the
| third will always be red. After that it's green and/or yellow.
| Only then do you get blue or blue-and-green. This can also be
| seen in the writings of Homer where honey is described as
| green, and hair is described as... blue, that is, the same term
| was used to describe the sea as well as corn flours (i.e., a
| dark colour). It's with Empidocles that we see the
| classification of colour the Ancient Greeks would have used:
| light, dark, red, and yellow.
|
| After blue/blue-and-green the order breaks down a bit, but new
| colour terms obviously come into use after blue. In English for
| instance the terms for pink, orange, and brown all came long
| after blue. Coincidentally brown is usually one of the last
| colours to get its own term, and in English before the term
| brown was used to refer to a colour it referred to dark or
| dusk.
| thevardanian wrote:
| What might be missed is that black and blue are not
| necessarily differentiated. I know that, at least among
| Indian languages specifically Sanskrit, black and blue aren't
| as differentiated as they are today. A dark color/black was
| seen as dark blue.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| As Tool put it in Lateralus:
|
| Black / Then / White are / All I see / In my infancy / Red
| and yellow then came to be
|
| Fun fact: syllable count follows Fibbonaci sequence
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Pink and orange are not basic color words. They're the names
| of physical objects co-opted as a general color. It's the
| same for all the cultures that don't have a word for blue.
| Their users just refer to blue as the "color of the sky" or
| the "color of bird X". Same as English using the "color of
| this citrus".
| EamonnMR wrote:
| You have to wonder if people working with dyes had (now lost)
| terms of art to describe colors.
| Aengeuad wrote:
| I would imagine the dyes were referred to by the materials
| used to create them, cochineal for a red dye, woad for a
| blue/indigo dye, etc. The etymology of purple does come
| from a shellfish or a fish and purple dye did historically
| come from a sea snail but the name for that particular dye
| likely didn't come from the same root as purple.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| So then what does it mean for languages who split blue into two
| colors? In Russian, there are famously two: sinii and goluboi.
| perl4ever wrote:
| Google translate seems to think those are blauw and cyaan,
| respectively. I'm not sure why it decided to translate into
| Dutch though...
| john-aj wrote:
| When translating Russian, both are usually translated as
| blue. Sinii is used about dark blue things, like the sea,
| and goluboi about light blue things, like the sky.
|
| But translating it to "dark/light blue" would be incorrect,
| as the lightness is not an important part of the words. It
| is just that Russian speakers are forced to specify the
| lightness, similarly to how German speakers are forced to
| specify the sex of their neighbor (Nachbar/Nachbarin). In
| most cases, Nachbarin should simply be translated to
| "neighbor".
| Aengeuad wrote:
| This post is maybe a little off topic, but the view of
| linguistic relativism and specifically of Whorf (Sapir-Whorf
| hypothesis - linguistic relativism), as well as many 19th and
| 20th century philosophers, was that the Ancient Greeks must
| have viewed the world differently to us, or to put it
| bluntly, that all ancient peoples must have been colour
| blind. This then extends to the modern day, do Russian
| speakers view the world differently because of the separation
| of light and dark blue, are English (and most other language
| speakers) blind to the colour goluboi as it's grouped
| together with 'blue'?
|
| When the significance of sinii and goluboi have been studied
| an effect is seen, Russians _are_ faster at differentiating
| between these shades of blue. When it 's put this way and
| framed positively it's absolutely an alluring idea and one
| used to sell language books, learn Russian to literally see
| the world differently, but is it significant? Russians are
| about 125ms faster at differentiating between shades of light
| and dark blue because having a separate word to group them
| into does confer some advantage, but importantly English
| speakers are still just as capable of distinguishing those
| shades. This is also true even for languages that lack
| distinction between other colours, a particular language not
| having a separation between say blue and green doesn't mean
| that speakers of that language are any less capable of seeing
| a distinction between blue and green even if they refer to
| those two colours using just one word.
|
| Another example of the issues of applying such findings to a
| world view would be Mandarin which represents the month
| before as 'above' and the next month as 'below', and studies
| do show that Mandarin speakers are faster at determining
| whether March comes before April after having been shown a
| picture with some verticality. When looking at these results
| through a Whorfian lens it'd be easy to make the claim that
| Mandarin speakers view time as vertically. More studies were
| done, Mandarin speakers were once again faster at guessing up
| was previous (compared to down for previous) by 170ms. Seems
| conclusive and further evidence that Mandarin speakers may
| view time as being vertical, however, the same study found
| that mandarin speakers were 230ms faster at guessing left as
| previous (compared to right for previous) and they were
| faster at doing this than they were doing it vertically. Also
| noteworthy was that they found English speakers were 300ms
| faster at guessing left for previous than compared to right,
| and in both cases of vertical/horizontal guessing English
| speakers were faster than Mandarin speakers (although English
| speakers preferred bottom as previous to top as previous).
|
| This is where the issues of linguistic relativism pop up and
| why today it's generally heavily criticised and no longer
| considered valid by linguists, when applied to colours or
| time it appears relatively harmless but it's not always
| framed positively and that has been the case for as long as
| the theory existed. An example of a harmful application of it
| would be to look at the many African languages that use the
| same word for meat and animal, are they incapable of telling
| a difference between them? In English it's often pointed out
| that the term beef comes from the French aristocracy where
| the term cow comes from the Anglo-Saxon speaking peasant/serf
| class, which of these two would have been more acquainted
| with raising and slaughtering the animals and would they have
| been unable to make the differentiation? We absolutely know
| today that even despite lacking terms for certain colours
| people are still able to differentiate between them, to know
| this after having studied it and then say that the Ancient
| Greeks must have been colour blind seems absurd.
|
| >So then what does it mean for languages who split blue into
| two colors?
|
| Personally? It's really neat and being able to differentiate
| those shades faster is an interesting consequence of that, I
| just can't view it through a Whorfian lens. I'm also somewhat
| envious of the differentiation after having been told
| numerous times as a child that while teal/turquoise are blue
| they're not really 'blue'.
| dorchadas wrote:
| Very good points on linguistic relativity. I'd also be
| interested in if any of the studies have been replicated or
| not. One of the big proponents of linguistic relativity is
| Lera Boroditsky, author of the famed 'bridge gender study'
| (that was _never_ actually published!). However, someone
| tried to replicate that study and they found no
| statistically meaningful results. I 'd be very interested
| in seeing it for other 'weak linguistic relativity'
| studies. I'd also be interested to see the debate between
| language and culture. Is it the culture noticing something
| that causes the language to develop that way, and
| influences things? In my view, that's more likely the
| source of any differences, though I'm still not sure they
| actually exist.
| Aengeuad wrote:
| I can't take credit for the arguments made, they mostly
| come form the excellent book 'The Language Hoax' by John
| McWhorter, I should have referenced this in the original
| comment but it's a bit too late to edit it. In the book
| he takes a very hard stance against linguistic relativism
| and demonstrates the harm the theory can have when
| applied by certain people to certain languages or
| peoples, he even goes as far as to caution about the
| recent trend for weak relativism. There's also a 45
| minute talk he did on the book as well (0).
|
| One example in the book would be the Piraha who famously
| don't have words for numbers, they can describe 1 'that',
| 2 'pair', a few, and many, but not much else. It wouldn't
| be hard to imagine the harm that would be caused by
| taking a Whorfian approach would have on such a tribe. In
| this subchapter he does make the point that it's culture
| that drives the linguistics, and the subtitle of which is
| pretty pertinent, 'Tribe without Paper or Pencils
| Mysteriously Weak at Portraiture'.
|
| Lera Boroditsky is a good mention as well, she authored
| both of the mentioned studies on Mandarin. The first was
| 'Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English
| Speakers' Conceptions of Time' (2001) (1). Other
| researchers have tried to replicate this study (2) and
| were unable to do so, although they note that all
| documented examples of linguistic relativity can't be
| dismissed just from one flawed study, and explicitly note
| that the effect of the mechanisms is unknown and that the
| issue is with the claim that language is the mechanism.
| Boroditsky followed up with 'Do English and Mandarin
| speakers think about time differently?' (2010) (3). It
| still seems to be an active area of research and I don't
| think we'll get a conclusive answer any time soon.
|
| (0) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QglKeIIC5Ds
|
| (1) http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/mandarin.pdf
|
| (2) 'Re-evaluating evidence for linguistic relativity:
| Reply to Boroditsky (2001)'
| https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-karin-
| stromswold/p...
|
| (3) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.
| 1.1.690...
| thriftwy wrote:
| Modern Russians can differentiate between much more bluish
| colors, such as "sea wave", turquose, etc. I think it's the
| same with any people exposed to modern paints and hues so
| the effect is bound to be less important.
|
| But they are not considered as separate spectral colors,
| whereas light blue is. So Russians have 7 colors in the
| rainbow.
|
| I don't think that learning Russian will help your color
| perception in adult age and without being exposed to light
| blue paints, pyramid disks, toys, etc.
|
| In fact, I'm not sure it will persist as much in the next
| generation of Russian children whose toys are usually made
| for world wide audience and don't set the light blue color
| out of myriad of hues.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| Interesting point. I learned Russian as an adult for work
| -- and my colleagues always told me that Russians see the
| difference between the two blues the same way that we as
| English speakers see the difference between "pink" and
| "red". Pink is technically light red, but there is
| immense cultural significance invested in making the
| distinction.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Yep. Modern Russian children will have easier time
| telling pink from red than light blue from blue since
| they share the common material culture with the rest of
| world, but otherwise you are spot on.
|
| Pink is another little color which appeared a short time
| ago and permanently extended our palette.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| People from UK have 7 rainbow colours too - Red, Orange,
| Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.
|
| The first Blue is like a cyan colour, the second indigo-
| blue is the colour of blue ink (a night-sky blue).
| thriftwy wrote:
| Then you've got two Russian blues already. That's exactly
| that.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| > There was no blue in the Odyssey or the Iliad because the
| Greeks didn't have a word for it yet.
|
| That's not true. From the description of Alcinoos' palace in
| Odyssey 7.87: peri de thrigkos kuanoio ("around was a cornice
| of blue enamel"). kuanos is dark blue, and it is used later in
| Greek to describe the color of lapis lazuli. In the Iliad it's
| used of blue enamel on armor, as at Iliad 11.24: tou d' etoi
| deka oimoi esan melanos kuanoio ("there were ten stripes of
| dark blue enamel") on the breastplate of Agamemnon, and kuaneoi
| drakontes ("blue enamel snakes") two lines later.
| stephenhuey wrote:
| In later stages of Greek it meant blue, but I also had read
| how for Homer it probably did not mean that. Here's a quote
| from the related Wikipedia entry:
|
| The word kyanos (kuanos), which in later stages of Greek
| meant blue, does make a limited appearance, but for Homer it
| almost certainly meant "dark", as it was used to describe the
| eyebrows of Zeus.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer)
|
| Also see this 2015 paper:
|
| Wine-Dark Sheep: Ancient Color in a Modern Greek Odyssey
|
| https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=111.
| ..
| I_complete_me wrote:
| > linguistic studies that show blue to be the last color named
| in virtually all languages
|
| In Irish, the term "fear dubh" refers to the devil literally
| "black man" which presumably long preceded Irish language
| interaction with non-whites. To refer to a black (coloured) man
| in modern Irish the term "fear gorm" is used. The word 'gorm'
| in other contexts means blue. This would match your comment.
|
| As an aside, the term "fear ban" is literally "white man" and I
| leave it to the curious to guess or research it's meaning.
| dorchadas wrote:
| In this case, there's multiple issues going on here. First
| 'gorm' in the case of 'fear gorm' didn't mean blue. It meant
| 'dusky', 'swarthy'. Also, 'fear dubh' refers to a black-
| haired person; 'An Fear Dubh' refers to the devil. 'Fear ban'
| would likely refer to _hair color_. Irish traditionally
| classified people on their hair color (thus 'Roisin dubh'
| was 'Roisin of the dark hair', not that she was dark
| complected).
|
| Another big issue is Irish colors _don 't_ match up to
| English ones, at all. So many seem to think 'gorm' matches up
| to English 'blue', when it doesn't. It's different. Same with
| 'glas' and 'green', which is why you can have 'capall glas'
| or a 'green horse', but really it's a different color split
| that English. Same with 'speir glas' to describe a 'grey
| sky'. It's a huge problem among learners who learn the
| language incorrectly (most in Ireland, sadly).
| I_complete_me wrote:
| Go raibh mile agat!
|
| Ta an ceart agat. My 'fear dubh' was intended to be "An
| Fear Dubh". If you are male you have "An Fear Ban", the
| colour of men's clothing presumably being dark in contrast!
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| It's really interesting, but I've noticed the same pattern in
| development with my kids. My eldest had a strong tendency to
| label blue things as "green".
|
| I'll have to test him for color blindness of course, but I
| don't think that's the issue. I think it's just that the two
| are more similar than it appears to me as an adult.
| TorKlingberg wrote:
| I am always a bit suspicions of statistics on countries or other
| geographical groups of people. The data points are not really
| independent samples. To take an extreme example, imagine you have
| a dataset containing Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Brazil, Bolivia and
| Paraguay. I'm sure you could find all kinds of interesting
| correlations there, but I wouldn't trust them because you really
| only have two data points: Scandinavia and South America. Even if
| your dataset has all the counties of the world many of them have
| a shared history and influenced each other, so correlations
| between variables may be accidental.
|
| To return to the topic of colors, I wonder why the light or dark
| versions of some colors are called something else. I can easily
| imagine a light blue or a dark blue and they are still clearly
| blue. Same with light or dark green. Dark red is fine, but light
| red becomes pink. Yellow always feels like a light color, and
| dark yellow becomes some kind of brown. Is there a physical
| reason, or are these arbitrary cultural distinctions?
| DFHippie wrote:
| I think these are precisely the arbitrary cultural distinctions
| people are arguing about. I too feel that the difference
| between pink and red is categorical whereas that between pale
| and dark blue is mere nuance. Apparently Russian speakers feel
| about dark and pale blue as I do about red and pink.
|
| I am a linguist, so I've been aware of this debate for quite
| some time, though I've never followed it that closely. What I
| don't understand is how anyone operationalizes this notion of
| "basic color terms". English has hundreds of color terms at
| least, but the "basic" ones are supposed to be white, black,
| grey, red, green, blue, orange, yellow, purple, brown, and pink
| (I don't think I'm missing any). People agree on this list and
| accept it. They agree on a different list for Russian, adding
| one more, which is roughly cyan. They agree on different lists
| for Xhosa and Nahuatl and so forth. But how do they come to
| agree? I agree that the list given for English feels right. Is
| this all they do? "Does this feel right? Yes." That seems like
| a weak basis for such a long-term debate. On the other hand,
| much of the evidence argued over in linguistics is of this
| nature. "Does this sound odd to you, other linguist? Yes.
| Data!"
| ageitgey wrote:
| If you get interested in etymology, you'll see that each language
| encodes the history of who spoke it during the time it was
| forming and changing (which continues into the present). There's
| lots to be learned about history by studying languages.
|
| One of my favorite examples is the word "sky". Sky comes from the
| old norse [1] for "cloud" or "obscured". Presumably when Old
| English developed on the British Isles, the sky was generally
| full of clouds. So when they needed a word for the thing above
| them, they seemingly borrowed the world for "cloudy" instead of
| "sunny". That probably wouldn't have happened if English
| developed somewhere with better weather.
|
| [1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/sky
| memsom wrote:
| This happens a lot in English. English has a lot of meaning
| drift, even in native words from Anglo Saxon. For example, deer
| used to mean any animal, but you have hound (any dog), meat
| (any food), fowl (any bird), and many, many more. You even have
| stuff like wrist, where it means "joint between hand and arm"
| in English, by vrist in Swedish means ankle. In earlier proto
| Germanic I believe it meant multiple things and each language
| just picked something quite randomly.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yep and "man" used to mean human, with "Wer" and "Wif"
| distinguishing the genders. It only became masculine-specific
| later.
| kseistrup wrote:
| Even today, the word for "cloud" is "sky" in both Danish and
| Norwegian.
|
| While the primary meaning for "sky" is "cloud", a more rarely
| found form, "i sky" (literally "in cloud"), means "in the sky".
| sgt wrote:
| Sky in English is basically the same. It originally meant
| something that obscures, upwards into the heavens.
|
| Presumably people were quite used to clouds. Looking at the
| etymology of the word, one finds sky in Old Norse, skiwja in
| Proto-Germanic, similar in Old English and Old Saxon all the
| way to Proto-Indo-European skewH (to "cover, bedeck").
|
| Look at wiktionary.org - hours of fun.
| 0xdada wrote:
| I had to go and dig up this old HN comment (and the radiolab
| episode it references):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11580007.
| involans wrote:
| The Greek for sky (ouranos/Uranus) is etymologically related to
| words for rain (see: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BF%E1
| %BD%90%CF%81%CE%B1...). Greece isn't known for its abundant
| rainfall.
|
| It is actually fairly normal to name the sky for the things it
| has in it (clouds, rain, etc), and it is not a strong indicator
| of how good the weather is.
| [deleted]
| lolc wrote:
| I found Through the Language Glass a fascinating read. One main
| topic in the book is names for colors.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8444621-through-the-lang...
|
| A thing that stuck with me is how European explorers thought some
| natives were colorblind because they didn't have words for blue.
| The scientists at the time concluded that it's obviously because
| the natives hadn't evolved color-vision. Or weren't given color-
| vision by God. This theory got cast into doubt when it turned out
| that the natives could easily distinguish strings with different
| shades of blue.
|
| The book goes on to show that languages tend to add words for
| colors in a certain sequence. I think it was first red, then
| green, then yellow ad other colors and last blue.
|
| So this study looks more like it found the last languages who
| wouldn't have added blue were in sunny places. Not that the
| speaker have impaired color vision.
| kleiba wrote:
| Anyone interested in this topic should feel free to check out the
| work of Paul Kay at Berkeley, who did the groundwork for this
| line of research, starting back in the 60's and 70's.
|
| https://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/
| makz wrote:
| Related, why in Japan they use blue for semaphore lights
| https://steemit.com/science/@tendenciaglobal/why-japan-has-n...
| throw0101a wrote:
| Given the relative prevalence of red-green colour blindness
| this is probably a general good idea.
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