
Blue–Green Distinction in Language - prismatic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_language
======
mikorym
This is true of the whole Sotho-Tswana branch of languages. They mention it
for Tswana, albeit briefly.

It is also one of the reasons why English is taking over (and in less serious
cases, borrowed from). English is fully developed for social, scientific,
technical, complex, specialised and precise communication to an extent rivaled
maybe by only a dozen other languages.

On the Northern Sotho radio stations you often hear kids say, when asked about
colours, "Ke ye blue" ("It is blue"). The radio presenter would sometimes
correct the kid and say "Aowa, ka Sesotho re re ke ye tala." However, there is
something deeper at play and something perhaps unassuming yet complex: _the
kid is more accurate_.

The value of languages like these is not the ability to convey or store
technical or scientific information. But if a language disappears is like
losing in one shot the whole of Beethoven's work (and a bit more than that).
Sotho may have less colour words (yellow=brown too) and also it doesn't have
delimiters in the sense of "far, further, furthest" (having only "far",
"further", and then emphasis) but it has... verb modifiers!

For example: use = to cause to work. Repair = to cause to be good. Understand
= to cause to hear.

Wow, am I telling you that verbs convey and encode causality in these
languages? Yup, that's right.

~~~
Juliate
It's not due to English own linguistic merits in itself - and it
borrowed/borrows from other languages as well.

English has taken over because, in our local history so far, because it's been
the official language of the last two main world military (hence cultural &
business) powers: UK for 19th century, US for 20th century - boosted by WW I &
II & furthering globalization.

It's been also shaped by this globalization worldwide.

In 1, or 2 centuries, it very well may be that another language will have
taken over.

[https://blog.esl-languages.com/blog/learn-
languages/english-...](https://blog.esl-languages.com/blog/learn-
languages/english-language-global-number-one/)

~~~
henrikschroder
> It's not due to English own linguistic merits in itself

Well, English is a pretty simple language, grammatically. Compared to its
Germanic neighbours, it doesn't have gendered nouns, it doesn't have the funky
word order of German, nor the funky word order of the V2 Scandinavian
languages. It has fewer letters in its alphabet, and it has fewer phonemes.

It does have a very large vocabulary, mostly due to the French influence, and
it's in dire need of a spelling reform to fix all the accumulated crap, but
those are hurdles for _writing_ English or _mastering_ English. When it comes
to _speaking_ simple English, the bar is lower than what is required for
speaking simple German, or simple Norwegian, for example.

It's also pretty forgiving when it comes to word order, which means
understanding _bad_ English is also easier. So I think there's some sort of
lowest common denominator merit to it that made it easier for it to take over.

~~~
Juliate
That's seen through your own lens.

Just compare the delicacies of the differences between British English &
American English, if not only for the different understated meanings.

The "funky word order" of German makes sense from a German perspective (and
back to ancient Latin & Greek).

Mandarin is not simple, comparatively to English. Yet, you can be quite
assured that, would China, for instance, get the military & cultural influence
UK/US had for 2 centuries, by 2200 they wouldn't have spread something else
than a globalized Mandarin worldwide (as it happened for English; and French
and Spanish before them).

~~~
octbash
Besides vocabulary/characters, in what sense is Mandarin not simple?

~~~
2a0c40
Tones

~~~
kaesar14
Which is a massive sense in which it is not simple! For any non-native
speakers, (I'm a native English speaker), tones were nearly impossible to
master, and I still have a terrible grasp of them I think. It requires a
complete rewiring of the way you speak language, sure, but it also requires a
complete rewiring of how you hear it too!

------
kenhwang
My biggest confusion learning Chinese when I was growing up was the concept of
"orange". I believe orange only became part of the common vernacular fairly
recently. But since Chinese words are just a combination of other words, the
words for obviously orange things were using red/yellow.

Now in modern usage, the color orange is named after the fruit, but the name
of the orange fruit differs by region. Some places refer to oranges as
tangerines, with no differentiation between oranges/tangerines, so the word
for orange is actually tangerine in those regions.

There's a good write up of other colors here:
[https://everything2.com/title/Chinese+colors](https://everything2.com/title/Chinese+colors)

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Now in modern usage, the color orange is named after the fruit

This is also true in European languages. (Including English.)

~~~
RmDen
Interestingly in dutch oranje is the color but sinaasappel is the name of
fruit in dutch.

~~~
arexxbifs
There are many various descriptors for red, orange and yellow. In Italian an
egg yolk is called "rosso" (red), whereas in Swedish it's called "gula"
(yellow). As a side note, Orange (the fruit) is called "Apelsin" in Sweden -
meaning "Apple from China", just as in Dutch. Red onions would nowadays be
categorized as mostly purple, etc.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> In Italian an egg yolk is called "rosso" (red), whereas in Swedish it's
> called "gula" (yellow).

In this case, it's possible that the different conventions for what color to
call an egg yolk originated from egg yolks that were different colors. Crack
an egg in China and you'll get something that is obviously different -- and
much redder -- than what you'd get from an egg in the US.

This freaked me out enough that I exclusively purchased high-end eggs from
City Shop, which were a reassuring yellow.

------
LatteLazy
There are "7" colours in the rainbow because Newton said so. He said that
because 7 is a biblical number and he was really really into biblical
numerology.

~~~
Aardwolf
Newton gave it: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet

Imho, indigo and violet are the same thing (at least very close), and cyan is
missing, so red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, violet would have made
more sense

But of course it's indeed quite possible the language shifted and it made
sense in Newton's time

~~~
belinder
Imo cyan and blue are a lot closer than indigo and violet

~~~
Aardwolf
To me cyan looks blue-green, really in the middle but also significantly
lighter than blue, while indigo and violet both look purple-like

I'm not a native English speaker though, and as far as I know neither cyan nor
indigo are commonly used in standard everyday language, but more in their own
niches (printing, clothing, ...)

------
legulere
In German we nowadays have a distinction between “rosa” (light pink) and
“pink” (shocking pink, some hues of fuchsia). It’s kind of funny that we got
the word pink from English just in the 80s

------
zone411
"Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages"
is a fun read. It covers this blue-green distinction and a few other language
curiosities.

~~~
martopix
Awesome book, and one of the things I remember best about it is indeed about
colours. He says historians of literature wondered whether ancient (homeric)
Greeks were colourblind, since they describe the sea as "wine red"; but in
fact it's just that they used "red" to describe certain dark colours. This
later already changed in classical Greece.

------
try_again
Does someone know if this is purely a property of languages and their
evolution or if there is a biological or neurological foundation for this? I
understand that you could make names for colours as fine-grained as you want
with visible light being a continuous spectrum, and at the most base level
there is only a concept of "colour" without further distinctions. But to me it
feels like the major divisions as we know them in English are intuitive beyond
language. Surely when you look at grass and the sky you feel you need
different terms to describe them?

~~~
glenngillen
I put together a image to try and explain the difference:
[http://a.gln.io/blue.png](http://a.gln.io/blue.png)

There's 16 different shades, or colours, there. If I was to point to any one
of them individually and ask my young children what colour it was they'd
almost certainly say "blue". And I'd understand them fine and consider it
correct. Likewise if they were explaining something they saw during the day
and said it was "blue" I might make an assumption about which of these shades
it was, but I intuitively know it could have been any of them. And most of the
time the distinction isn't that important for understanding and sharing
experience.

When the distinction is important my kids would probably simply say "light
blue" or "dark blue". Additional adjectives will get used to clarify the
relative difference between the colours.

Soon they'll learn "sky blue", "baby blue", "navy blue". Then teal, turquoise,
aqua, cyan, cerulean, etc.

Assuming the language has those words. That only occurs when the need to
distinguish is common enough to established a shared understanding across a
large enough group of people that they effectively reach a consensus that it's
now a thing, like English speakers did a few hundred years ago with the
introduction of the colour orange. Nobody invented a new colour, we started
using a new word to describe something that had always been.

~~~
glenngillen
Definitely tangential to this discussion, but it's about language and
sufficiently geeky I think the HN crowd would probably appreciate:

I read a book a few years ago called Alex's Adventures in Numberland
([https://www.amazon.com.au/Alexs-Adventures-Numberland-
Alex-B...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Alexs-Adventures-Numberland-Alex-
Bellos/dp/1408809591/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)). In it he
has a story about a group in South America who have no words in their language
for a number greater than two (or maybe it was three? It's been a while since
I read it). Anything larger than that was just referred to as "many". It's not
as though seeing more than two of anything was uncommon, most families would
have a half dozen to a dozen children. But if you asked how many children they
had it was just "many". Whether it was eleven or twelve just wasn't an
important distinction to them.

He goes on to discuss how language can expose what's important to a group and
shape thinking. The introduction of a concept and word for zero was hugely
important for our advancement in all number of fields. He also discusses how
our constant pursuit for ever increasing levels of specificity has it's trade-
offs: we seem to be becoming increasingly bad at estimating (which is both
language, social expectations around what we value, and a reliance on tools).

Anyways, it was a story about language and numbers that I thoroughly enjoyed.

------
Scarblac
XKCD's Randall Munroe did a survey about color names, and the report he did on
it is fantastic: [https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-
results/](https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/) , both
informative and hilarious.

------
leoc
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language#/media/File:Colours_in_Irish.png)
is probably the main reason why the term for a black man in Irish Gaelic is
'fear gorm', the default literal translation of which would usually be 'blue
man'. (Not a native speaker, but I had reached a decent level, many years ago
now.)

------
Aloha
I wonder how much the invention of azo dyes effected our perception of color
and words thereof.

------
Animats
"They're so different" [1].

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2fgquYTCg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2fgquYTCg)

------
Areading314
White and gold.

~~~
henrikschroder
Blue and black!

------
dehrmann
The more and more I learn about color, the more I learn what we're taught as
children is wrong.

Primary colors are arbitrary, the only reason there's three is possibly
because we have three types of cones, but really to cover most of the visible
spectrum.

So yeah, color spaces are a thing.

Cone sensitivity doesn't line up with primary colors, and some are more
sensitive than others.

Tetrachromacy exists in humans, so some people can see more colors.

Magenta and violet are very different. Magenta isn't a real color, two colors
we interpret as one.

The sky is actually blue and purple. If you look hard at it you can see both,
kinda like seeing RGB on a white LCD.

And I'm sure there's more.

~~~
tiglionabbit
My high school art teacher made us make color wheels using red, yellow, and
blue paint. She showed us books that use these "primary colors" and said that
this makes them more pleasing to children.

I thought about it for a moment. If these are the primary colors, why aren't
they what printers use? Printers use cyan, magenta, and yellow. And there's a
great symmetry there, since those are all the secondary colors to light's
primary red, green, and blue, which are the colors used in computer monitors.
And the only thing that makes these colors primary to us is that they're the
colors that the cones in our eyes perceive.

So I decided to experiment. When I made my color wheel, I substituted blue for
cyan and red for magenta. The color wheel I produced was much more vibrant and
beautiful.

There are a lot of things my school teachers tried to teach me that show up on
wikipedia's common misconceptions list. For example, the "equal-transit-time
explanation of aerofoil lift". I got pretty jaded about this stuff. Now I
don't trust anyone's explanations unless I can understand them on a deeper
level.

~~~
try_again
Printers use cyan, magenta and yellow because printing is a subtractive
process. It's the complement of the additive RGB that monitors use. For
example, cyan acts as a filter for red, so a combination of magenta and yellow
filters out everything but red and thus appears red. Ultimately, the
difference is in whether something emits light (a monitor) or has to reflect
light (a white piece of paper).

You're right in that what we're taught is often incomplete or misguided.
Teachers are fallible. But as a child you assume their authority implies them
being correct. I reckon seeing through that illusion is an important part of
growing up. And to me, part of us growing up as humanity must involve not
having to rely on the authority of governing bodies.

~~~
tiglionabbit
The additive/subtractive colors thing is has a really neat sort of symmetry to
it. That's how I knew it was the correct explanation. There was no such
beautiful internal logic to the Red Blue Yellow system and I couldn't figure
out how people came up with it.

I never believed my teachers. As early as 4th grade they were treating me like
a troublemaker for not following rules like their three-paragraph essay
format.

I don't like the idea of having authorities on knowledge. I much prefer
Montessori or Socratic teaching methods, or explorations. They're harder to
do, but they produce a better understanding of the material and they allow the
student to teach the teacher as well.

~~~
braindeath
Yeah, unfortunately color perception is one of those things that is a bit too
complex for a self-discovery method. While the "symmetry" explanation is
satisfying it really isn't correct at all. Color perception and color matching
within art (where it was useful) and more recently as a science is something
that is complicated and took many years of the best scientific minds to figure
out. Sometimes you need authorities on knowledge, and stand on the shoulders
of giants as it were.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20080717034228/http://www.handpr...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080717034228/http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color6.html)

The teachers aren't completely "wrong", they were just conveying a
simplification of history of pigments (also touched on in that article). It is
after all true you can mix those colors and get a wide-range of colors
(including a blacker black then you would with CMY). But any pedagogy that
says there is such a thing as "primary" colors that make all colors is
necessarily going to be wrong, even if its CMY.

