
Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language (2015) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/26/color/why-red-means-red-in-almost-every-language
======
jedberg
This title isn't a great title and the article doesn't explain the concept
very well.

What this is trying to say is that human languages all over the world come up
with color names in a similar path, but they stop at different points.

It's all very fascinating, and interestingly is the argument some use against
strong AI -- that is they believe that to truly understand language you must
have a human or human-like body that can perceive the world in the same way as
a human, because these color words develop based on the physical properties of
your eye and brain. For example, many people that are blind from birth have a
hard time understanding the concept of color.

A few of you mentioned that Russian has two words for red. Russian is actually
at the end of the spectrum (pun intended) -- that is they have the maximum
number of color words.

English is close but we don't have separate words for blue and light blue.

You can see this as English speaking children learn words -- they will call
"pink" "red" until they learn pink, and will almost always learn "red" before
"pink".

Some cultures just stop with "warm" and "cold" (which are red orange yellow vs
green blue purple).

Ah the joys of being a CogSci major -- we had entire weeks of classes devoted
to this.

~~~
ryanx435
>English is close but we don't have separate words for blue and light blue.

Azure. Celeste. Cerulean. Cyan. Teal. Turqouise. aqua. Aquamarine. Lapis.

~~~
quicklyfrozen
None of those are light blue :-)

~~~
xrange
Any of these light blue?

[http://www.sherwin-williams.com/homeowners/color/find-and-
ex...](http://www.sherwin-williams.com/homeowners/color/find-and-explore-
colors/paint-colors-by-family/family/blue/)

~~~
jedberg
Yes, but see my other comment about why they don't count (they aren't basic
color terms).

------
coldtea
>* His field had long espoused a theory called linguistic relativity, which
held that language shapes perception. Color was the “parade example,” Kay
says. His professors and textbooks taught that people could only recognize a
color as categorically distinct from others if they had a word for it. (...)
The two languages are as unrelated to each other historically as any two
languages can be,” Kay says. And yet they seemed to give rise to a common way
of seeing and thinking about color. Either he and Berlin had stumbled upon a
one-in-a-million coincidence. Or the relativists were wrong.*

Or relativism is truer for less tangible things (like how we deal with
societal and abstract notions based on our language) than about stuff we
experience directly, like color.

~~~
rubber_duck
Saying that you can only think about abstract things if you have words for
them is tautological since abstractions build on language.

~~~
coldtea
> _Saying that you can only think about abstract things if you have words for
> them is tautological since abstractions build on language._

The actual relativist core is not about "only being able to think X if you
have words for it" (which is bogus imho), it's about the "language shapes
perception" part.

Besides, abstractions are not just built on/from language -- else they would
be meaningless names. They are based on experiences -- which are not just
experiences of actual tangible things but also of circumstances, common
feelings, etc. Freedom for example, while an abstract notion, is painfully
"tangible" as an experience when its taken away from you, whether you are
Japanese or Irish, etc, so one would expect all cultures to form the relevant
words to describe it (and that is the case).

Thus one could think of freedom even without having access to the word -- just
by having in his mind the relevant sensation (as a mental picture, etc).

But even more so, a system of language (associated words and notions) also
shapes how we approach freedom beyond the basic underlying sentiment.

------
eukaryote
I was surprised in this article that "wine-dark" is still being bandied about
as a translation for οἶνοψ πόντος. According to a scholar I spoke with many
years ago, a more reasonable translation would be gleaming or shimmering. This
would fit with another known use of οἶνοψ, referring to the back of an oxen in
the sun.

~~~
twoodfin
It's hard for me to believe that "gleaming" or "shimmering" would be an
objectively better translation. Even putting aside that it's a beautiful turn
of phrase, Homer's audience would have been conscious of the simile suggested
by the word choice, no?

~~~
eukaryote
I do agree wine-dark is a beautiful turn of phrase, but from what I gather the
literal translation is "wine-faced" or "wine-eyed".

Have considerable experience of being "wine-eyed", I can assure you my eyes
are generally gleaming. :-)

------
mzs
Polish has two reds - czerwony and rudy - I mean in the sense that even a
young Polish child would use the different words for different colors that a
young English speaking American child would call both simply red.

~~~
mr_pink
Similarly, Russian has two blues: goluboy (like the sky) and siniy (like the
sea). Nobody, not even a child, would confuse the two, or consider them the
same color. Even blue eyes are differentiated into these two categories, just
like English speakers differentiate between blue and green eyes.

~~~
monocasa
I see the Russian distinction between blues equivalent to the distinction
between red and pink for English speakers.

~~~
tetromino_
I'd disagree. As an English speaker, you probably think of pink as a "light
red" or a "shade of red" or "red with some white pigment mixed in"; while red
is a fundamental color. As a Russian speaker, goluboy is not a shade of siny -
the two colors are equally fundamental.

~~~
monocasa
They're typically taught to children as distinct colors.

The first three images google gave me for "kindergarten colors":

[http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kkd-
_JfiGWA/TUdXevHfRUI/AAAAAAAAAb...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_kkd-
_JfiGWA/TUdXevHfRUI/AAAAAAAAAbI/q7kmBpRAeIw/s1600/Screen%2Bshot%2B2011-01-31%2Bat%2B7.43.57%2BPM.png)

[https://s-media-cache-
ak0.pinimg.com/736x/fe/a8/da/fea8dad8f...](https://s-media-cache-
ak0.pinimg.com/736x/fe/a8/da/fea8dad8fe3f95e089882a59eb7fa185.jpg)

[https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0MfwZHSO9lA/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0MfwZHSO9lA/maxresdefault.jpg)

~~~
int_19h
The easiest way to tell is to ask about colors in the rainbow. Obviously,
rainbow is actually a spectrum with no clear boundaries, so where the
boundaries are placed is entirely down to the culture of the person describing
it.

In Russian, sky blue is a distinct rainbow color from blue, but pink is not.

In English, blue and indigo are treated as distinct colors, but this is more
tradition than perception (so as to pad the number to the requisite 7).

If you compare the typical representation of the rainbow, you'll see that it
has the corresponding difference. Russian depiction of rainbow has pure
medium-dark blue between sky blue and violet, and violet is dark:

[http://nobacks.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/11/Rainbow-26.png](http://nobacks.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/11/Rainbow-26.png)

(Note that blue in this pic is about as dark as it gets; quite often it's
actually lighter - usually, sky blue and blue are closer together than blue
and violet.)

English depiction of rainbow has some kind of really dark blue with a strong
hint of violet in the same place, and violet is brighter:

[http://weknowyourdreams.com/images/rainbow/rainbow-02.jpg](http://weknowyourdreams.com/images/rainbow/rainbow-02.jpg)

------
crummy
Related, here's a visualization that shows connotations from different
cultures for colours:
[http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours...](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-
in-cultures/)

~~~
Waterluvian
Cool! Though I think a flat matrix would be far more readable. Can't really
see if there are any trends on first glance.

------
shric
To slightly throw a spanner in the works, the word for an egg yolk in Thai is
"ไข่แดง" (kai daeng). ไข่ = egg, แดง = red. I've no idea why they use red
here.

This isn't a color disagreement. The Thai word for red is otherwise identical
to the red English speakers know of, and there are other words for the actual
colors of yolks (i.e. yellow or orange) and Thai chickens don't produce red
yolks :(

~~~
geomark
I'm not so sure. Thais call things แดง that don't look red to me. The egg
yolks you mentioned are one of them. Brown dogs are another. People with dark
complexion are another (if really dark they call them เขียง = green).

~~~
himlion
Blond hair is also often called red.

------
pavel_lishin
As long as we're randomly talking about Russian colors, there's a color that I
used to hear a fair amount in Russia that I don't know of an equivalent to
here in the US: рыжый.

Maybe it's not a common color term there, either - the most context I've heard
it in was describing a dachshund's hair color[1], and the second most common
is describing a redhead's hair. Maybe the English equivalent is "ginger", but
I always thought of ginger as being a much lighter color.

[1] [http://www.allsmalldogbreeds.com/breeds/dachshund-
smooth.jpg](http://www.allsmalldogbreeds.com/breeds/dachshund-smooth.jpg) <\--
an example. Это рыжая такса.

~~~
tetromino_
I think it's hard to find an exact equivalent because Russian has a number of
color words that are used mostly for one category of objects. For example,
рыжий for human or animal hair, русый for human hair, карий and болотный for
eyes, смуглый for skin, etc. So when translating, you might pick the English
equivalent for describing that type of object (рыжие волосы = red hair), but
it doesn't feel quite right, because that same English word would be perfectly
OK for describing the color of all sorts of unrelated things (and might imply
a different shade when applied to those unrelated things!), and the original
Russian word wouldn't be.

------
woliveirajr
It would be interesting to see some color map for each of those groups.

Also, do parents who moved abroad have kids with different perception? And
would have analysis in some genetic factors (as babies seem to indicate) and
the cultural influence.

~~~
moron4hire
It's not a difference in perception, it's a difference in communication.
Imagine a room full of people wearing "pink" shirts, and you want to call out
specifically one of those people, but you don't know the word "salmon" in the
context of a color of shirt. You absolutely see the difference in the colors
of the shirt. Your lack of language does not change your perception. You know
the color and you could pick it again when asked. You just have to go through
convolutions to communicate the exact nature of the color to others.

~~~
SamBam
The linguistic relativist's position (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) _is_
specifically that people with different color words perceive colors
differently.

It's mostly discredited now, but that's exactly the position being discussed
in the article.

~~~
tetromino_
> It's mostly discredited now

Unjustly so. There is experimental evidence that at least in for some
languages and some colors, language affects the ability to distinguish colors.

Here is one example:
[http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.short](http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.short)

> English and Russian color terms divide the color spectrum differently.
> Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter
> blues (“goluboy”) and darker blues (“siniy”). We investigated whether this
> linguistic difference leads to differences in color discrimination. We
> tested English and Russian speakers in a speeded color discrimination task
> using blue stimuli that spanned the siniy/goluboy border. We found that
> Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into
> different linguistic categories in Russian (one siniy and the other goluboy)
> than when they were from the same linguistic category (both siniy or both
> goluboy). Moreover, this category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but
> not a spatial, dual task. These effects were stronger for difficult
> discriminations (i.e., when the colors were perceptually close) than for
> easy discriminations (i.e., when the colors were further apart). English
> speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show a category advantage
> in any of the conditions. These results demonstrate that (i) categories in
> language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks and (ii) the
> effect of language is online (and can be disrupted by verbal interference).

------
glup
It's funny that the author points to the possibility of a synthesis, when one
was just published within the last month by the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences:
[http://www.pnas.org/content/113/40/11178.abstract](http://www.pnas.org/content/113/40/11178.abstract).

------
chx
There's a _fascinating_ book on this topic, that is Guy Deutscher: Through the
Language Glass.

~~~
int_19h
I'll second that. If anything in the article made you curious, absolutely get
the book.

------
Thaxll
Red in French is "rouge" which is close enough :)

~~~
antarrah
Which doesn't necessarily mean the color red in French.

~~~
VeejayRampay
I'm French and I have no idea what you mean by that.

~~~
antarrah
It's often used to refer to cosmetic for coloring the lips.

[https://www.google.ca/search?q=define+rouge+&oq=define+rouge](https://www.google.ca/search?q=define+rouge+&oq=define+rouge)
[http://www.dictionary.com/browse/rouge](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/rouge)

~~~
VeejayRampay
No one calls it "rouge" in France. It's always referred to as "rouge à lèvres"
(lit. "red for lips").

