
Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/26/color/why-red-means-red-in-almost-every-language-rd
======
jrapdx3
Color perception is a subject that's fascinated me for a long time. Humans are
visually rather unique, as unlike most other mammals we are able to see beyond
yellow into the orange and red spectral range.

That's probably attributable to trichromacy, having three classes of retinal
cones. The article points this out and correctly notes the complexity of
visual circuitry without giving much detail. That's OK, the layers involved in
translating retinal impulses, the exquisitely intricate slicing and dicing
visual information into encodings for shape, motion, texture, surface, depth
as well as color are truly mind-boggling.

That suggests to me that trying to ascertain linguistic influences on the
visual system may be a form of "premature optimization". Of course it will be
no surprise to find out there are cultural effects on verbal color description
and communication conventions. OTOH it's also plausible to suppose that humans
of various cultures can distinguish colors equally well when color naming is
not demanded.

Artists who care about color don't care about the names colors are called by.
What is important is being able to distinguish subtly different colors in
order to be able to produce results. On the web #ff8844 doesn't have to have a
name, it does the same thing anyway.

At the end of the day it's important to determine if language really changes
what we see, or only the modes of communication, styles, fashions and all the
layers piled on top of actual sensory experience.

Perhaps in everyday activity who cares if a shade is "orange" vs. "tangerine".
When fine color discrimination really counts, in art, engineering, medicine,
color names are secondary if necessary at all.

BTW if anyone wants to informally test their own color discrimination ability,
I'd recommend looking here: [http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-
challenge](http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge)

~~~
gmac
I did the test but found it entirely un-illuminating. I got '19' where '0' is
perfect, but I have no idea where that puts me in the distribution (top 10%?
bottom 10%? bang on the median?).

~~~
zhte415
The same test done more properly with results seems to be here:
[http://www.color-
blindness.com/fm100hue/FM100Hue.swf?width=9...](http://www.color-
blindness.com/fm100hue/FM100Hue.swf?width=980&height=500)

The OP's link did give some information:

It does give a little information:

"A lower score is better, with ZERO being the perfect score. The bars above
show the regions of the color spectrum where hue discrimination is low. "

"Your score: 6"

"•Your score: 6 •Gender: Male •Age range: 30-39 •Best score for your gender
and age range: 0 •Highest score for your gender and age range: 1520"

It mentions it is the Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test, which links to
Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth-
Munsell_100_hue_tes...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth-
Munsell_100_hue_test)

The Wikipedia article links to a couple of images which indicate normality of
the scale [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Farnsworth-
Munsell3.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Farnsworth-Munsell3.png) and

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e12e
_Actually_ related xkcd: [http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-
results/](http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/)

~~~
stewartbutler
It is amusing that 'salmon' shows up on the male side of the gender comparison
chart. The only time I've ever seen that used for a color is in Halo. Wonder
how much that biased the results.

~~~
antillean
Haha, same with teal. I only know it because of StarCraft and WarCraft 3 (and
now DoTA etc).

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I know teal from Windows 95's default desktop background colour :)

Although it must be pointed out that Windows 16-colour VGA teal is a different
colour to Windows 256-colour VGA teal.

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golemotron
> Kay and Berlin took these commonalities as evidence that our conception of
> colors is rooted, not in language, but in our shared human biology.

The legacy of the 20th century is the belief that we are nearly completely
creatures of culture rather than biology. We're slowly learning that it isn't
true.

The interesting part is why we want to believe it. When you believe that human
nature is mostly culture, you feel that you can change it with social action,
education, and legislation. The surprises come when people realize that change
is not as easy as we would like to think.

~~~
RodericDay
afaik, part of the "legacy of the 20th century" includes the eugenics beliefs
and experiments carried out throughout the world, including the holocaust.

I'd say that the actual, scientific development of "nature vs. nurture"
carries on healthily in academic spheres, while online you find plenty of
hardcore zealots for either camp, from otherkin to racists talking about
"human biodiversity" and advocating for gender roles.

~~~
gizmo686
The 20th century contains thouse beliefs and experiments. The legacy of the
20th century is much more strongly defined by the Holocaust, which poisened
the idea of eugentics in a way that we are only now begining to undo, and only
in the limited (and somewhat controversial) practice of of pre-birth genetic
testing for known diseases.

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synthmeat
A bit OT, but wrt cross-linguistic similarities - I've always imagined this
list [1] would be _the_ resource for language origin studies, and I have dug
out absolutely no research to that effect. I'm sure there is some - this list
_was_ compiled - but not nearly as much as I hoped.

In particular, this could explain many similarities that are usually ascribed
to genetics, but are actually only there because of commonalities in
environment.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-
linguistic_onomatopoeias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-
linguistic_onomatopoeias)

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antillean
I enjoyed this article, but the dispute feels a bit contrived. It seems
obvious that:

1\. Language shapes perception.

2\. Biology shapes perception.

3\. External reality shapes language.

4\. External reality shapes perception.

I'm sure the precise form and extent of each of those "shapes" varies, and I
can see why there might be a lot of dispute about those details. But while I
can imagine some people wanting to strengthen some of those "shapes" to
"determines", I don't see how anyone can reasonably deny any of those
statements. (Yes, I think positions like "There is no, objective, external
reality" are unreasonable.)

And so yeah, I learned a good bit from this article. And empirical study of
words for colours is fascinating and should definitely be pursued. And I
wouldn't have guessed that the range of basic colours is so wide. But I found
precisely none of the results reported in that article surprising or
worldview-shaking.

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petewailes
Welsh (notable for these purposes in coming from a single root which is about
4k years old, and having branched off along with Gaelic and the other
Brittonic languages around a similar period), uses the same groupings. I'm not
sure at what point they turn up, but they're currently:

black – du white – gwyn grey – llwyd red – coch yellow – melyn blue – glas
green – gwyrdd brown – gwinau (brown to auburn shades) or cochddu (brown to
the dark reddish blacks) purple – porffor (also cochlas, which is a reddish
blue) pink – pinc or gwyngoch (for white-ish reds or pale reds) orange – oren
or melyngoch (for yellowish reds; a slight evolution from the conjunction of
melyn-coch)

I'd suspect that oren and pinc are more recent evolutions in the lexicon, with
gwyngoch and the associated red spectrum names, and gwyngoch and its cousins
more tightly defining those parts of the spectrum, rather than having an all
encompassing grouping for them. That's assumption and not based on evidence
beyond my own knowledge of British linguistic evolution though, so take it
with a pinch of salt.

It'd be interesting to look at common Brittonic and its modern descendants
though and see if and when they change, and whether that has broader
implications, similar to the point on "wine-dark".

~~~
1wd
I know nothing about Welsh. With white - gwyn and red - coch, gwyngoch looks
like it's basically "light red". Similarly melyngoch (with melyn=yellow) looks
like it's basically "yellow-red", and a few others (cochddu, gwinau?) look
"suspicious" as well. Would these be considered _basic color terms_ [1]?
Apparently the differente views have different definitions. [2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate)

~~~
petewailes
Welsh occasionally does things similar to German, where things end up squished
together to make a new thing. Other examples would be Aberystwyth (aber -
river mouth, Ystwyth - the river in question), rhagddodiad and olddodiad
(prefix and suffix), trosgais (a converted try in rugby) and so on. So yes,
it's a compounding of two other words, but that's kinda how it's done. Not
entirely sure if that makes it an argument for or against what you're saying
though.

~~~
abrowne
I don't know if any language lacks compound words. Your first example is shard
with English: (River) Dart + mouth -> Dartmouth (also Plymouth), Dart + moor
-> Dartmoor.

~~~
petewailes
The difference is English compound words were historically actually separate
words, which got compounded together through common usage. Brittanic and
German style languages intentionally compound words to form new ones.

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moron4hire
I always thought it was interesting that the Russian word for red is красный
(krasnyy) and the words for beautiful are прекрасный (prekrasnyy) and красивый
(krasivyj) (though I never understood the difference). So "Red Square" in
Moscow is not "Red" as in the color or "Red" as in communism, it's "Beautiful
Square".

~~~
mynegation
Russian word "krasnyy" did mean "beautiful" before 14-16 centuries, and Old
Russian language used other words for the hues of red (including the word
derived from worms in other Slavic languages, discussed in other thread here).
It is unclear how "krasnyy" came to mean "red". Some say it is because female
beauty was associalted with blush, bu no one knows for sure.

Russian has a word for a color that is phonetically close to "red" (or even
close to the french "rouge"), but it means what in English is called "ginger"
and is used predominantly for hair color.

Also, learning French and English in my childhood that these languages do not
have a special widely used word for "light blue" as in Russian.

~~~
moron4hire
Thanks for clarifying. I am generally not a good student of languages, so I
don't typically get very far into any particular one to learn details like
this.

But as for the "light blue" issue, what sort of shade are you referring to? Is
it голубой (goluboj)? There is Azure--a Latin-root word that came to English
through French--or Cyan--a word of Greek origin.

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4ndr3vv
"Grue" referenced in the article as a colour encompasing green and blue
reminded me of a Radiolab Episode [1] on the order in which words are
established for colours; Across all cultures words for colors appear in stages
- Blue being the last colour to be named.

[1] [http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-
blue/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/)

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jane_is_here
Rakta: Sanskrit ( an Indo-Aryan language ) Chomapeh: Malayalam (A Dravidian
language ) Lal: Hindi / Urdu / Punjabi ( three related Indo-Aryan languages)

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jacquesm
Interesting to read this article on different monitors to see the colors be
rendered so the greens and the blues can be barely told apart on the one
monitor and are clearly different on another. I wonder if that was taken into
account during the study but it would seem to me to be pretty important since
'red' appears to be rendering mostly correct on all of them.

~~~
stan_rogers
That really depends on what you think of as "red". I tend to categorize
automatically into "scarlet" and "crimson" (too many hours spent with oil
paints and pastels over too many decades), rarely ever seeing anything as
"merely red", and that division is sometimes blurred by monitor calibration
(or, rather, the lack of same). It's not so much that I see different things
than other people with good colour vision, just that I have learned to do a
primary categorization of "red" with two buckets instead of one.

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JulianMorrison
Proposal: the following observations: humans chunk color even as infants,
language controls the experience of color, make sense together if you stop
treating language as a confounding factor and treat it as the goal.

Humans evolved color chunking to be able to talk about it.

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sombremesa
Reading this article, I found it fascinating how endemic prejudice is to the
human experience. I don't mean prejudice in the negative sense, but in the
sense of unreasonable bias.

"His professors and textbooks taught that people could only recognize a color
as categorically distinct from others if they had a word for it."

"Scientists had no reason to suspect that cultures divvied it up in similar
ways."

And then, the conclusion:

"Cultures seemed to build up their color vocabularies in a predictable way."

As humans, we make things up. There is no getting away from it, due to our
limited perspective. Sometimes I muse on the fact that we once thought the
Earth was flat because at some point, someone essentially "lied".

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tehchromic
> He noticed that the ancient Greek poet Homer used colors in a very strange
> way (for instance: “wine-dark sea”)

It could also be the case that Homer was using a complex metaphor that related
the mystery of alcohol, and maybe it's brooding hangover to the dark color of
the liquid, and linked that to the dark quality of the sea at times, for
example before a storm when the sky is overcast.

Great article!

~~~
dudurocha
You are probably joking, but to get more perspective on this 'blue' color,
there is a great resource:

[http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hoffman_01_13/](http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hoffman_01_13/)

<q> We may never know for sure, but one peculiar fact casts the mystery in an
interesting light: there is no word for “blue” in ancient Greek.

Homer’s descriptions of color in The Iliad and The Odyssey, taken literally,
paint an almost psychedelic landscape: in addition to the sea, sheep were also
the color of wine; honey was green, as were the fear-filled faces of men; and
the sky is often described as bronze.

It gets stranger. Not only was Homer’s palette limited to only five colors
(metallics, black, white, yellow-green, and red), but a prominent philosopher
even centuries later, Empedocles, believed that all color was limited to four
categories: white/light, dark/black, red, and yellow. Xenophanes, another
philosopher, described the rainbow as having but three bands of color:
porphyra (dark purple), khloros, and erythros (red).</q>

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murbard2
The assumption that we can only see color we have a name for is widely
repeated despite being obviously bogus.

I know maybe a dozen words for colors, but that doesn't prevent me from seeing
the differences between the different tones in a pantone catalogue.

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dvh
In my language, red (červený) has very similar stem as worm (červ).

~~~
smcl
Do you know if the months červenec & červen are related to the words for red
or worm?

edit: or maybe you're not Czech and these months have different word in your
language :)

~~~
pmr_
The Wikipedia article linked in another reply to parent confirms that. The
months in which the worms were harvested were named after the worms.

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le_clochard
Because red is the color of blood.

~~~
freyr
Yes. The author suggests the categorizations are either cultural or
biological; another possibility is that they're defined due to common human
experiences that transcend cultures.

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cpncrunch
Link not working on mobile devices.

~~~
cpncrunch
It looks like the wrong link was submitted. It should be:

[http://nautil.us/issue/26/color/why-red-means-red-in-
almost-...](http://nautil.us/issue/26/color/why-red-means-red-in-almost-every-
language)

(without the -rd on the end). This link works correctly on all devices.

