[HN Gopher] How "blue" and "green" appeared in a language that d...
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How "blue" and "green" appeared in a language that didn't have
words for them
Author : geox
Score : 38 points
Date : 2023-11-02 15:54 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (news.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.mit.edu)
| kens wrote:
| For more on why languages start with words for "dark" and
| "light", then add red, blue and other colors in order, see my
| Journal of Irreproducible Results paper "Laundry and the origin
| of basic color terms": https://righto.com/papers/laundry.pdf
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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.
| arketyp wrote:
| The introduction was interesting and thankfully the reference
| checks out as serious:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms
| fsckboy wrote:
| it's funny one of the links on that wiki page I had already
| visited, "Tinctures in heraldry"
| kens wrote:
| To clarify, the Journal of Irreproducible Results was a
| magazine of scientific humor. The article is a plausible but
| absurd explanation for a real linguistic phenomenon, Basic
| Color Terms.
| reppelle wrote:
| 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.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Aren't you imposing the modern meaning onto the past? The
| word didn't mean specifically blue or green originally, but
| rather both, right? I don't see how this would contradict the
| fourth rule.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| It's not just about different languages. I bet a graphic artist
| sees distinctions in colors that most people would group
| together. At the extreme end, Pantone has made a massive business
| of precisely dividing shades of colors.
| finite_depth wrote:
| 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).
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| Sometimes people use "pink" or "purple" to describe magenta,
| but (to me) magenta isn't either of those colors. Purple is
| the color that in technical contexts is known as violet, and
| pink is absolutely a type of red to me, specifically a
| desaturated red.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| > an English speaker recognizes "azure" as a kind of "blue"
|
| at least in French, _azur_ is a kind of blue (washed out dark
| blue, I would say). I guess it came to us from Spain.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/2598/
| NeoTar wrote:
| [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.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| How is one supposed to read "Tsimane'"?
| finite_depth wrote:
| 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 e, 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).
| hardlianotion wrote:
| Thanks. It's spelled with e' in the article which just seemed
| mysterious.
| fsckboy wrote:
| the other key to pronouncing japanese as an American,
| starter pack, is to NOT put stress on syllables the way we
| do. Japanese green horseradish (like with sushi) is not
| waSAAbi the way we want to pronounce it, it's something
| like three equal syllables pronounced distinctly wa. sa.
| bi. then put them together and pronounce them fast
| wa.sa.bi.
|
| UK English has the same stress patterns as American English
| (Shakespeare, iambic pentameter) but I just haven't given
| any thought to whether my advice would be any different
|
| I said "starter pack" because imho the first step is to
| stop pronouncing things American. Japanese does have some
| stress patterns, but you're not going to learn them easily.
| So just learn to flatten out the American stress and you
| are 80/20 there.
|
| Because you are so used to American stress, to your ear it
| will sound like you are saying WAAsabi, which is closer to
| your goal, but don't do that on purpose, and not long
| syllables, not waaaa saaaa biiii, clip them short and just
| flatten them out, wasabi and you'll be fine.
|
| ka-ra-o-k. sy-a-na-ra.
| Izkata wrote:
| > The last sound should properly be spelled e, not just e
|
| Assuming this is a Japanese word as the other response uses
| (the article doesn't really make it clear), there's at least
| two different transliteration styles for that sound, one of
| which is "e", the other of which is "e". I'd argue over the
| past decade or two the second one has become more common due
| to simplicity, direct transliteration of individual hiragana,
| and IME inputs. Names still seem to use the older style
| though.
|
| Though here the author did seem to be going for "e", but
| didn't have a way to type it so they approximated it by
| adding a ' afterwards.
| canjobear wrote:
| It's Tsimane' because the name of the language ends in a
| glottal stop. Sometimes this is mistranscribed into Tsimane
| in Spanish but that is incorrect; the stress is on the second
| to last syllable.
| guessmyname wrote:
| > _How is one supposed to read "Tsimane'"?_
|
| Input this on Google Translate and reproduce the sound -
| tsuimane [1]
|
| [1] https://translate.google.com/?sl=ja&tl=en&text=tsuimane
| dicytea wrote:
| It's not a Japanese word.
| tralarpa wrote:
| The comments here (not yours, dicytea) are really
| confusing. There are three comments about Japanese although
| the article clearly states that they live in the Amazon
| rainforest. Are those AI bots?
| NeoTar wrote:
| I have wondered with colour words if the increasing prevalence of
| computers and their related vocabulary is influencing English
| speakers use of colour words.
|
| For instance, as mentioned in the article English speakers have
| historically divided the range of colours into: Black, White,
| Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Purple, Brown, Orange and Grey. South
| American Spanish, along with Italian and Russian add a
| distinction between light-blue and dark-blue (maybe like the
| distinction between Red and Pink).
|
| In computers the most natural set of colours is more like: Black,
| White, Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. Has this
| influenced English speakers to draw incorporate new colour terms
| into their common vocabulary - Magenta 'feels' too close to pink
| to be a new colour for me, but Cyan (or equivalently Turquoise or
| Azure) feels different enough to be a new and distinct colour.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| What color is the soil?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The color of the soil. All of the languages with a paucity
| of dedicated color words can readily describe colors by
| reference. Orange, pink, and violet are not actual color
| words either. They've been imported to perform dual duty
| from their original meaning because they were used
| frequently enough to describe the color of oranges, pinks,
| and violets.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Not sure what you mean. Probably brown, why?
| kens wrote:
| I'm not sure what distinction you are making between marron
| (brown), violet, and orange in French from other basic
| colors. Can you clarify this?
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| OP mentioned that _English speakers have historically
| divided the range of colours into: Black, White, Red,
| Green, Blue, Yellow, Purple, Brown, Orange and Grey_.
|
| When we think about "basic colors", we would not add
| purple, brown or orange to the set. Grey neither know that
| I think of it.
| dukoolio wrote:
| Have to mention the related post from 2012 that made me fall in
| love with HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4956037
| turminal wrote:
| Related, one of my favorite in-depth stack overflow answers:
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/33206814
| chatmasta wrote:
| 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
| WalterBright wrote:
| You can make any program in a ; language a one liner.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Well sure, but I think everyone would understand a one
| liner as something that fits in a single loop.
|
| And you know that. Why are you arguing about this?
| jkleiser wrote:
| I can recommend this book by Guy Deutscher: "Through the Language
| Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages"
| samtho wrote:
| This is not unique to Amazonian languages, in fact, it's observed
| so much in other languages that I wonder how strange "western"
| languages are to make this distinction.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distincti...
| whatshisface wrote:
| Why wouldn't they just say "leaf color?"
| latchkey wrote:
| In Vietnamese, it is basically the same word and they say "sky
| blue" for "blue" or "green grass". As a result, my partner always
| gets green/blue in English mixed up.
| dehrmann wrote:
| As an English speaker, this is just bizarre because we have so
| many words for colors. Of course we have both periwinkle and
| lavender.
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(page generated 2023-11-04 23:01 UTC)