

How we gave colors names - sid6376
http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our-brains-part-i/

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tokenadult
I've been running into this issue since the 1970s as a second-language speaker
of Chinese. My wife, a native speaker of Taiwanese (whose parents, like most
Taiwanese persons in their generation, were educated in Japanese under the
prewar occupation of Taiwan by the Japanese Empire), tends to this day to
confuse "green" and "blue" when speaking English. Those colors are both 青 in
her mind. [AFTER EDIT, reply to first kind reply below: I mention Japanese
that my wife's parents spoke because it was the language focused on in the
submitted article, and to note that in their generation no other second
language that might have introduced a distinction between green and blue was
spoken in the family home. You are correct that historically Chinese also used
青 as a color term with a semantic range including both green and blue from the
point of view of an English speaker.]

But another puzzler I encountered as I learned Chinese, first in the United
States and then in Taiwan, was the broad range of colors that would be
identified as 黃 (traditionally translated "yellow," a term definitely used for
the yolk of an egg). One day in Chinese class in Taipei, my teacher, an older
(birth decade 1930s) native speaker of Mandarin who grew up in Beijing,
referred to the wooden tabletop in our classroom as 黃 in color. Aha! The term
黃 covers the full range of not just yellow, as we refer to yellow in English,
but also pretty much the entire range of what English speakers call brown. Of
course. Now I understand why the "Yellow River" 黃河 is called that, even though
when I have seen it directly the silt in the river made it look brown to my
eyes, not yellow. And similarly for referring to grass browning ( 變黃 ) in
autumn, as to my English ear, I would not call the color of grass in autumn
"yellow" but rather brown.

The book _Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution_ by Brent Berlin
and Paul Kay

[http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Color-Terms-Universality-
Evoluti...](http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Color-Terms-Universality-
Evolution/dp/1575861623/)

was originally published in 1969, and it set the agenda for subsequent studies
of how color terms vary across languages. The conclusion (as also related in
the blog post kindly submitted here) is that most languages around the world
begin with a very basic set of color terms that gradually accumulates more
fine distinctions, in a generally invariant order across most world cultures.
English has many color terms, but not quite as many BASIC color terms as a few
other European languages.

We can see this same kind of process in older terms and phrases in English.
What is called "red hair" in English (my late dad had that hair color) would
more likely be called "orange hair" today, except that there was no word
"orange" in English (that comes from the name of a foreign fruit, after all)
at that time, so the word "red" had the full semantic range of today's word
"red" and today's word "orange." That's quite comparable to the situation in
modern Chinese, where there now are competing, very new, words for "brown"
("[coconut] palm-colored" or "coffee-colored" often being used in actual daily
conversation) but many historical phrases in which 黃 ("yellow") is used for
colors in the same range.

~~~
yen223
"I've been running into this issue since the 1970s as a second-language
speaker of Chinese. My wife, a native speaker of Taiwanese (whose parents,
like most Taiwanese persons in their generation, were educated in Japanese
under the prewar occupation of Taiwan by the Japanese Empire), tends to this
day to confuse "green" and "blue" when speaking English. Those colors are both
青 in her mind."

I don't think this has anything to do with the Japanese. Historical Chinese
poems often refer to 青天, ie "green sky". 青 is probably what we would call
cyan, since there is another Chinese word for green - 绿.

~~~
alxndr
I've also heard that in rare instances, 青 can also mean black.

------
JangoSteve
This post was really interesting and made me think a bit differently about
color names (I think to an even deeper extend than the xkcd survey post from a
couple years ago). I also found the first comment [1] quite interesting,
namely this part:

 _For example, ao in Japanese comes from the dye plant, ai, which as a
dyestuff covers the whole of the blue-green portion of the spectrum. Some
cultures have what might at first seem to be peculiarly chosen "basic" color
names until you learn their associations with the culture's central food
sources or dye plants, or precious commodities. The color name that covers
both blue and green in many native languages of the American Southwest is also
the name for the stone, turquoise. (In cultures where a staple food is
poisonous when green and edible when red, you can be sure there are names for
green and red.) In our own history, we have a very similar example to the
"blue" traffic lights of Japan: "orange" didn't enter English as a color name
until the 16th century, after the fruit itself was first brought to England,
quite late in the evolution of our color vocabulary, which is why we still
refer to "red" hair._

[1] [http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-
fication...](http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-
the-world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our-brains-
part-i/#comment-567420008)

~~~
jballanc
What's funny about that comment (and a handful of others that follow) is that
they completely miss the fact that "turquoise" is probably one of the most
prominent examples of a "made up" color name coming from the French for
"Turkish".

------
bonobo
Now our vocabulary grew past the basic white-red-yellow-green-blue-black
separation and I believe it will keep growing. I say this because I consider
cyan and magenta to be new ramifications of that spectrum, both colors are
well recognized by name today.

I think this is due to how information is accessible today. Languages seem to
be able to separate a hue in two or more once the actual names are already
established—when the burden of naming and categorizing hues gives place to the
lesser burden of only memorizing the already named hues, then we can afford to
create another new name. Although brands of nail polish and ink have dozens of
different names for their colors, they often don't reach a consensus, and the
same color can have different names between brands. Without a consensus
(language is primarily based on consensus) all these subtly different hues can
be said to remain unnamed, I guess...

I also wonder if there's a limit to this, to how many colors we can name
before considering naming all colors in hexadecimal on a daily basis.

------
hayksaakian
The xkcd article linked within is more interesting than the actual article.

~~~
tspiteri
I found both really interesting. Whereas the xkcd article
(<http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/>) goes into some
detail into one experiment, the original article has a wider scope and touches
on several experiments, the xkcd experiment being one of them.

Also interesting is the follow-up article about how language is used by the
brain to distinguish between different colours
([http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/11/the-crayola-
fication...](http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/11/the-crayola-fication-of-
the-world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our-brains-part-ii/)).

------
alex-g
This blog article ([http://korystamper.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/seeing-cerise-
de...](http://korystamper.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/seeing-cerise-defining-
colors/)) by lexicographer Kory Stamper raises some similar issues about color
names in English - how does one define "cerise" or "taupe" in the dictionary,
when nobody can agree on what precisely they mean (where to draw the
boundary).

There is also the issue of how best to write the definition so that people can
actually understand it. Webster's Second and Third New International
Dictionaries included color plates (which seems reasonable!) but also gave HSB
values in the Second and complex color comparisons in the Third (cerise is "a
moderate red slightly darker than claret, slightly lighter than Harvard
crimson, very slightly bluer and duller than average strawberry, and bluer and
slightly lighter than Turkish red"). For the Learner's Dictionary, though,
they used definitions like "green is the color of grass", less precise but
probably still having some psychological truth - the color of grass is surely
an anchor point for our concept of green.

------
adorable
Fascinating article.

For a long time I've wondered why we humans usually describe colors as a 3
dimensional space (RGB) where it really only is a 1-dimensional one
(wavelength). Took me sometime to realize this was because we have 3 types of
rod cells ... and to start wondering how the world looks for the living
creatures who have 4, 5 or more rod cells...

~~~
Someone
We humans? More 'we computer programmers'. The model 'humans' have more
closely follows CIE
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_model#CIE_XYZ_color_space>).

If, instead of measuring it, you asked naive subjects (probing for what they
are conscious of), you might even get answers where red and violet are highly
separated (as in a rainbow), but I think you can make them question that model
easily by creating a palette going from red to violet that does not include
orange, yellow, green, or blue.

In either case, the problem remains that humans perceive colors that do not
physically exist, such as brown (aka 'dark orange-ish') and gray (aka 'shades
of white')

Historically, some people would have known about mixing paints. That might
have change their ideas about color, but that isn't RGB, either.

Finally, I am not sure one's color space will change with the addition of
types of cone cells (it is cones, not rods that are color-sensitive. It
alliterates: kones are for kolor).

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Fargren
On a similar vein to that of the japanese traffic lights, here in Buenos Aires
traffic lights for people used to be green and red, but at some point they
changed to white and red. However, people still say "verde" (green) for the
white light that means you can walk.

Traffic lights for cars are still green, yellow and red.

------
js2
Tangentially related, this reminded me of the color hue test -
[http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?pageid=77&lang=pt](http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?pageid=77&lang=pt)

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manveru
I was really mystified why Japanese kept calling a green traffic light "blue"
(in Japanese, that is). It didn't really make sense to me until reading this,
so thanks a lot.

~~~
yen223
I was mystified by 'redheads', since I've never seen anyone with naturally red
hair. The article also did help clear that up too.

------
crazygringo
Funny, in Brazilian Portuguese nobody refers to traffic lights by their colors
at all, despite being the same traffic lights used everywhere else in the
world -- the light is either "open" (for green) or "closed" (for red).

It took me forever to remember to speak in terms of open/closed instead of in
terms of colors, when driving...

~~~
arturhoo
Not quite true. As a Brazilian myself, from the state of Minas Gerais, we most
of the times say: the traffic light is green.

What is often debated between people from different states is if the light
(usually) positioned in the middle is yellow or orange.

But yes, __sometimes __we also say, the traffic light is open/closed.

