Why is pink a color?

[RachelChristine]

I have no idea why I started wondering this, but it is really bugging me now. Why is pink a separate color? Light blue is light blue (or sky blue or whatever). Light green is light green. Light yellow might be called pale yellow. Even when dealing with a color like light purple, which you might call lavender, it is still considered a shade of purple. But go lighten up red and suddenly you have pink -- a whole new color! It's rare to think of pink as light red, you know?

Maybe a dumb question, but it's stuck in my head.

[LawMonkey]

Russian has a similar phenomenon: light blue is голубой* and dark blue is синий. I saw an article somewhere suggesting that this may affect the perception of the colors, but I don't know how far I take that. I am curious how it developed in the language(s) though.

*Bonus: This is also the common term for homosexual, probably closest in meaning to the English 'gay.'

[beowulff]

Light Black is Grey.
Light Yellow is Straw.
Dark Green is Emerald.

Lots of colors have names...

[freckafree]

OK, this is a WAG, which I know is frowned upon in GQ, so I'll see if I can find anything to back me up.

One of the common names for a variety of dianthus is "pinks," which, as I understand it, are not named for their color, but for the "pinked" or zigzag edges of the petals (think pinking sheers). Pinks are indeed pink, so is it possible the color was named for the flower?

ETA: Wikipedia says I have it bass ackwards -- that pinking sheers were named for the flower, and perhaps the color, too.

[friedo]

Russian has a similar phenomenon: light blue is голубой* and dark blue is синий.

So what you're saying is, in Soviet Russia, pink is blue!

[yabob]

Why isn't orange "dark yellow"?

Actually, wiki has a fairly lengthy article on color naming, in which they talk about "pink" as well as other things (such as "orange"), and reference the Kay and Berlin studies that Cecil mentioned as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_name
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/449/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors

[RachelChristine]

Light Black is Grey.
Light Yellow is Straw.
Dark Green is Emerald.

Lots of colors have names...

See the problem I have with this line of reasoning is that when I call something Emerald, everyone still thinks of it as a shade of green. Same goes for most of the other colors -- straw, sky blue, lime, lilac, rust... They are all thought of as shades of whatever. Pink, however, is not thought of as a shade of red, but as a color in it's own right.

Think of it this way. If you are wearing a shirt that is maroon, I might say "What a nice red shirt you have on." That wouldn't be wrong. However, if you were wearing a *pink* shirt, it would be incredibly weird for me to say that.

I can see how you can argue Light Black is Grey, but I don't think so much of that because the whole White---Black color spectrum isn't on the color wheel in the same way the "big six" are. Brown is like the other major colors too -- whether it's tan or beige or mocha or chocolate, it's still brown.

I honestly didn't remember Cecil writing a column on colors. I'm off to look them up, and check wikipedia. And how interesting about Russian! I never even thought of it in terms of language. I'd be interested in knowing how other languages do colors. They would have names for the whole range, same way English does, but when do they have something like Pink, that has taken on it's own identity as a color.

[Chronos]

Why isn't orange "dark yellow"?Because orange has more red in it than dark yellow does.

Light Black is Grey.
Light Yellow is Straw.
Dark Green is Emerald.

Lots of colors have names... Yes, but straw is recognized as a shade of yellow, and emerald is recognized as a shade of green, but most Americans don't recognize pink as a shade of red. If I saw an emerald-colored car, I might say "Look at that green car", but I would never say that Barbie's Corvette is red.

[kunilou]

Brown is like the other major colors too -- whether it's tan or beige or mocha or chocolate, it's still brown.

I'll wager there are a whole passel of colorphiliacs who will argue that while mocha or chocolate could be considered "brown" tan and beige wouldn't be.

[lissener]

Kind of for the same reason we have ice instead of frozen water; it's just a linguistic thing. No one sat down and created the English language out of whole cloth. If they had, it would a lot more logical. It evolved, like an organism, or an ecosystem. So you have Pandas with false thumbs, and you have words like "pink" and "ice."

[DSYoungEsq]

The Perfect Master Speaks (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/449/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors)

[Bootis]

From the Cecil column DSYoungEsq linked to:

In a study of 98 languages from a variety of linguistic families, they found the following "rules" seem to apply:

1. All languages contain terms for white and black.
2. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
3. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).

What would a speaker of these languages (especially 1 and 2) say if they were shown a blue piece of paper and asked what color it is?
Is it just a matter of them not having a specific word, but they would say something like, "It is like the sky",?

[C K Dexter Haven]

What would a speaker of these languages (especially 1 and 2) say if they were shown a blue piece of paper and asked what color it is?
Is it just a matter of them not having a specific word, but they would say something like, "It is like the sky",?My guess (and partial memory) is that they don't really have words for "black" and "white" so much as for "dark" and "light." Thus, blue would either be "dark" if it was a navy blue, say, or "light" if it was cyan.

[Isamu]

My guess (and partial memory) is that they don't really have words for "black" and "white" so much as for "dark" and "light." Thus, blue would either be "dark" if it was a navy blue, say, or "light" if it was cyan.

Yes, and for languages that contain 4 color terms, red and blue are more like "relative redness", and "relative blueness".

[antechinus]

Brown is like the other major colors too -- whether it's tan or beige or mocha or chocolate, it's still brown.


Brown is dark orange, in the same way that pink is light red.

Pink and maroon would be considered a variety red to some people and lime a variety of green.

[Civil Guy]

Don't have much to add, but I was a juror on a trial a couple years ago where one of the witnesses was from Thailand (I think), could only speak that language, and had a translator present for giving testimony. I found the results curious, such as I remember them - when asked what color a car was, the translator responded with roundabout answers, not the answers most any english speaker would use. I believe that a light blue car was indeed described as having the color of the sky, or some such.

It wouldn't be, IMHO, that the speaker couldn't see the color, only that there was no abstract standard for saying what the color was - so the speaker could only use analogies, and analogies have their limitations (as do 'standards'). ...Does that make sense?

Don't know why 'pink' is singled out like it is, but would ponder that sky-blue is pretty different than what I would consider 'pure' blue. ...Maroon is a special color, as is vermillion. Chartreuse probably doesn't count, since I know that it's sort of greenish...

[Civil Guy]

...would only point out more of the fairly obvious. Seems that red was a pretty important color from way back. Makes sense, seeing how it would have been a pretty obvious sign of injury, disease, and death. There would have been more time to distinguish between the deep red that's a sign of trouble (or victory, if it happens to your enemies), and the pinkish red that's a sign of health and youth.

[Chronos]

What would a speaker of these languages (especially 1 and 2) say if they were shown a blue piece of paper and asked what color it is?
Is it just a matter of them not having a specific word, but they would say something like, "It is like the sky",? With such languages, it's not so much that they don't recognize blue as a color, as that they would argue that it's a shade of white, in much the same way that Americans would argue that cerulean is a shade of blue. Well, those Americans who know what "cerulean" is, anyway.

[The Tao's Revenge]

With such languages, it's not so much that they don't recognize blue as a color, as that they would argue that it's a shade of white, in much the same way that Americans would argue that cerulean is a shade of blue. Well, those Americans who know what "cerulean" is, anyway.

It's the town where you battle the gym leader misty to get your water badge.

[Exapno Mapcase]

See the problem I have with this line of reasoning is that when I call something Emerald, everyone still thinks of it as a shade of green. Same goes for most of the other colors -- straw, sky blue, lime, lilac, rust... They are all thought of as shades of whatever. Pink, however, is not thought of as a shade of red, but as a color in it's own right.
I totally disagree. Pink is absolutely thought of as a shade of red. Sometimes it's it own color, but then so is lilac or puce or chartreuse or ecru. People use pink however they feel and in many different ways. In my experience, however, pink doesn't get any more special treatment than any other shade of red.

[Siam Sam]

Don't have much to add, but I was a juror on a trial a couple years ago where one of the witnesses was from Thailand (I think), could only speak that language, and had a translator present for giving testimony. I found the results curious, such as I remember them - when asked what color a car was, the translator responded with roundabout answers, not the answers most any english speaker would use. I believe that a light blue car was indeed described as having the color of the sky, or some such.

Yes, the term for "light blue" in Thai is see fa, which literally means "sky color." (Regular blue is see namngern, which is water-something. Actually, it would be "silver water," the nam referring to liquid, but I don't think that one works literally. But the metal is ngern and the color see ngern.)

(Thai also has separate words for pink and red. See chomphu for the former and see daeng for the latter.)

[Jragon]

I totally disagree. Pink is absolutely thought of as a shade of red. Sometimes it's it own color, but then so is lilac or puce or chartreuse or ecru. People use pink however they feel and in many different ways. In my experience, however, pink doesn't get any more special treatment than any other shade of red.

I disagree, one example is if you have a five-man-band of some sort in a show, you're going to have a bunch of primaries and "definite" colors (blue, red, maybe black etc) and "the chick" is almost always gonna be pink, even if there's someone who's red whereas you usually wouldn't have someone both blue and light blue.

If that's not a good comparison, think of how odd it would be for me to come up to you and say "what a nice light-red shirt you have there" if it was a pink shirt you were wearing, but you (well, most people) wouldn't blink if I described your cyan shirt as a "nice light-blue shirt."

Interestingly enough, wikipedia has color categories for all the primary/secondary colors of both RGBW and CMYK, but substitutes magenta for pink (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Colors). Maybe I'm reading too much into that though.

It also may be different where you are (you're in the UK, right?) so it could be a cultural divide with the US thinking of pink as more of a distinct color whereas other English speaking nations don't.

(Also, I do disagree somewhat with the finding Cecil cited, there are languages that contain terms for yellow and blue, but not green. In fact, wikipedia has a whole page on languages that treat green as a shade of blue or vice versa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language. Japanese is a good one, where they have words for yellow (kiiroi) and blue (aoi) but green for the longest time was a shade of blue, and in fact some green (midori, which I don't think has an adjective form but I could be wrong) things are still described as aoi. Which looking at the relevant section on Wikipedia is almost word for word what it has to say on the subject).

[t-bonham@scc.net]

I totally disagree. Pink is absolutely thought of as a shade of red.I disagree too. Pink is just a name given to a modified red. No different than using lavender for a modified purple.

But pink is a tint of red, not a shade. Shades are darker versions of the base color, lighter versions are tints.

[Bootis]

With such languages, it's not so much that they don't recognize blue as a color, as that they would argue that it's a shade of white, in much the same way that Americans would argue that cerulean is a shade of blue. Well, those Americans who know what "cerulean" is, anyway.


Let's say for an experiment, we have a group of people who speak one of those languages where there is only words for black, white and red. We know they can distinguish between colors, but just that they have no name for them besides red (and white and black, or dark and light). Then lets say one of them is shown a green ball and is told to tell the others to take that ball- then, the the ball is placed among many of distinctly different colors. In this case, just calling it light or dark couldn't suffice, but he is still able to discern it in his mind clearly from the other balls. I wonder how he would go about communicating that? (without being allowed to say something like "the 4th ball from the left") I guess there could be several ways to go about it, but I wonder also if it would be something he would have to think about how to do, or if it would just come naturally, and be the same description that any other of the group would have used too.

[brujaja]

RachelChristine, the short answer is: because a box of Crayola "64 Colors" had a "pink" crayon, and a "light red" crayon. Two separate colors. Also, a "light green", "light blue", etc.

So, by our collective 6-year-old reasoning, if "light red" was light red, "pink" must be an altogether different animal. Crap, there may even have been a "light pink." Can you blame us?

But, at least we know the difference between perriwinkle and thistle! ;)

[foolsguinea]

Actually, wiki has a fairly lengthy article on color naming, in which they talk about "pink" as well as other things (such as "orange"), and reference the Kay and Berlin studies that Cecil mentioned as well:I've been reading a book on "folk-taxonomies," & the writer goes on & on about color. He makes a good case that Kay & Berlin were so convinced that the English color taxonomy was "complete" that they ignored contrary evidence.

[foolsguinea]

Do you consider the "Big Six" to be red, orange, yellow, green, blue, & purple? Because that's totally culturally constructed. Abstract colors, as opposed to colors of things (like "lilac" or "brick") vary from culture to culture in how they're defined. The focalities of color (what "yellow" looks like, etc) aren't exactly the primary colors as defined by retinal response.

Chinese tradition has seven "Colors of the Rainbow" roughly translating as red, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue, & purple.
One European language (Hungarian?) considers olive a major color, distinct from both yellow & green.
(At least, according to Anderson's Folk-Taxonomies in Early English (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst;jsessionid=JCQB6VYp11w310BJ1xjttYJwnRZ3G1L1HslJXzyYsPpvkNncPFlr!2216916?a=o&d=113925013))

Western Europeans & Anglophones elevated "orange" (originally the color of oranges) to a major color, but regard "indigo" as just a shade of blue (or, bizarrely, a shade of purple which is not the color of indigo). And "blue" in English covers a range of colors from голубой to синий--a range with as much variety as yellow, orange, & yellow-green put together, lumped under one word.

Scientifically, I would consider the Six Big Hue Points on the Color Wheel (as far as present science is concerned) to be red, yellow, green, cyan/turquoise (aka printer's blue), not-quite-indigo blue, & magenta (which is also pink).

But colors as understood psycholinguistically aren't those compass points. Colors can be defined by luminosity. This yellow shade is the same hue & saturation as this shade half as bright--but some speakers would define "yellow" not to include the latter. Saturation changes things as well. This orange is more or less the same hue & brilliance as this tan, but they will be called different colors. And of course "blue" is any sufficiently highly saturated tone between printer's blue & indigo, except in certain technical applications. Some have tried to say the complement of scarlet red is "cyan", the complement of orange is "azure", & the complement of yellow is "blue"--which works for technical purposes, but really, historically, blue, cyan, & azure are all synonyms.
"Red" has sometimes included what we now call "orange" & it's still quite a broad range, despite some speakers trying to whittle away at by expanding the definition of "orange." "Orange," "yellow," & "purple" cover somewhat narrow ranges by comparison.

[foolsguinea]

There would have been more time to distinguish between the deep red that's a sign of trouble (or victory, if it happens to your enemies), and the pinkish red that's a sign of health and youth.Or simply that it's more functionally meaningful. I don't think it's about time to develop; ancient man had time. If there were a lot of blue & cyan things in nature such that distinguishing hues & shades of blue was important, we'd have more words for blue that aren't just names of dyes & precious stones. (Of course, we use names of dyes & precious stones, & metals, for lots of colors. But, say, earth tones & pinks have more terms that come from soils & living things as well as a few more abstract words.)

[Half Man Half Wit]

Interesting. I would not have thought of pink as a 'light red' at all, but as a separate, non-spectral colour (i.e. not something you'd find in a rainbow, or could get from the colours found in a rainbow simply by varying brightness -- like purple, for instance) -- there are dark pinks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink) after all, and they're not red.

So, do pinks actually lie on the axis of varying brightness (between absolute black and absolute white) drawn through some spectral red(s)?

[hobscrk777]

I think both sets of answers here are correct: Pink is in fact a shade of red just as emerald is a shade of green. However, the reason it would be unusual to call a pink shirt light red, but completely ordinary to call an emerald shirt light green, is because of cultural conditioning. For whatever reason, pink has become an established color in its own right, and people are accustomed to this (at least in the US).

[Acsenray]

What would a speaker of these languages (especially 1 and 2) say if they were shown a blue piece of paper and asked what color it is?
Is it just a matter of them not having a specific word, but they would say something like, "It is like the sky",?

I recall reading that there are languages (Welsh and Japanese, maybe?), in which most blues are categorized under "green."

[pulykamell]

I disagree too. Pink is just a name given to a modified red. No different than using lavender for a modified purple.

But pink is a tint of red, not a shade. Shades are darker versions of the base color, lighter versions are tints.

Depends on how you use "tint" and "shade." To me, "tint" is synonymous with "hue" and "shade" is luminosity (perhaps paired with saturation.) The old TV color controls used to have a "tint" setting, and this would vary the hue (on the magenta to green scale), not make the image lighter or darker.

That said, the dictionary seems to give all of the above definitions for "tint" and "shade." I'll just stick to hue, saturation, and luminosity for clarity.

To me, pink has always been red with a brighter luminosity and a range of saturations, depending on the "deepness" of the pink. As kids, when we used to make a pink substitute using a white crayon and a red crayon. I had never thought of pink as a separate basic color any more than fuschia or lavender or lemon are separate basic colors. I can't say the same about brown. I've always thought of that as a basic color that encompasses dark reds, yellows, and oranges.

[Chronos]

"Red" has sometimes included what we now call "orange" & it's still quite a broad range, despite some speakers trying to whittle away at by expanding the definition of "orange.It still does. When was the last time you saw someone with hair that was actually red?

[pulykamell]

It's actually quite interesting, as Hungarian has two words for red: piros and vörös. The latter has a more "emotional" connotation, and perhaps describes a deeper or darker red, but not necessarily. For example, paprika, paints, red lights, etc. are generally piros, but blood, wine, hair, communism, the Red Cross, even yellow onions, etc. are vörös. Vörös comes from the word meaning blood, vér, or bloody véres. Piros is the color you would use to describe the "red" in a spectrum, but vörös is generally used for more natural, organic things. But not always (see paprika and peppers [capsicum]).

[foolsguinea]

I recall reading that there are languages (Welsh and Japanese, maybe?), in which most blues are categorized under "green."Traditional Welsh draws the lines differently. There's no word for brown as such; there's a ~"dull" color word that overlaps parts of English "brown" & "gray." There's another word that overlaps parts of "blue" & "grey," & then yet another word that covers much of "green" & a chunk of what English speakers call "blue." I think some of the darker brown shades are tossed in with black.

But in modern colloquial Welsh, the English word "brown" is added, the word for ~"dull" is used like English "gray," the ~"blue-grey" is used like English "blue," & the ~"green" term is used like English "green." So they use the English taxonomy with Welsh words.

(again from Anderson, Folk-Taxonomies in Early English)

[hibernicus]

I recall reading that there are languages (Welsh and Japanese, maybe?), in which most blues are categorized under "green."

It might be the other way around - in Japanese the "green" traffic light is called "aoi" - the word for blue. So you may say that traffic-light green is perceived as a kind of blue, rather than a kind of green. However, to complicate the story a little, Japanese green traffic-lights are often noticeably bluer than ours.

Regarding the observation of modern Welsh using English colour taxonomy - I believe the same may be true in Irish. I have a vague memory of noticing that old poems used the word "liath" - grey - for what we would consider blue. But nowadays the word "gorm" corresponds closely to English "blue". Apart from "duine gorm" which means a black person, not a blue person!


People tend to think of languages lacking "blue" as being exotic and primitive. But as far as I know Latin and Ancient Greek both lacked words for blue. The word "blavus" is a mediaeval borrowing from Germanic, and is cognate with "flavus" meaning yellow.

For us the sea is blue, for Homer it was "wine-dark".

[RachelChristine]

Wow. This is so amazing. I guess I've never really thought about the science and culture behind colors and color names. I also always figured the "normal color wheel" was, you know, right! I am learning so much (as usual). I'm having run researching around the net too, thanks for answering me.

I do love to get a big box of Crayons and read through the names. My personal favorite color name I've ever seen -- Unmellow Yellow. That's just great!

[t-bonham@scc.net]

I do love to get a big box of Crayons and read through the names. My personal favorite color name I've ever seen -- Unmellow Yellow. That's just great!See here (http://aumha.org/html/colorsw.htm) for the official list of named HTML colors. Some interesting names there. And all defined by standard so they work on html webpages.

[Chronos]

I have a vague memory of noticing that old poems used the word "liath" - grey - for what we would consider blue.Clevelanders also use the word "gray" for what most folks would call "blue". But that's just because the skies there are perpetually overcast.

[Jragon]

Wow. This is so amazing. I guess I've never really thought about the science and culture behind colors and color names. I also always figured the "normal color wheel" was, you know, right! I am learning so much (as usual). I'm having run researching around the net too, thanks for answering me.

I do love to get a big box of Crayons and read through the names. My personal favorite color name I've ever seen -- Unmellow Yellow. That's just great!

I still like "safety orange."

[cmyk]

You must unlearn what you have learned about colors as we know them in everyday life.

Color names are relative approximations applied for the sake of practicality. My wager is that Pink was a color commonly used enough in western culture to warrant it a very prominent name. Etymology Online (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pink) says that the word "pink" was borrowed a flower "pale rose in color", also perhaps from the notion of perforated petals or being small, as in a pinky.

Anyway, what matters is it seems we get our color names from the things around us that remind us of that color.

Now, look at this color wheel... (http://www.businesscreatorpro.com/articles/images/color_wheel_theory.jpg)

Just by looking at this, it's clear just how relative colors appear. If I asked you to designate a pink tile from that color wheel, you might have some trouble deciding. But if I pointed to one of the light (tinted) reds or violets, and said that was pink, you probably wouldn't disagree.

This color wheel only represents Hue (the primary spectrum colors) and their tints (lightened) and shades (darkened). It is missing saturation, which saps the vividness of a color toward a neutral tone... toward grayscale.

Anyway, my point being, I think Pink seems like a more "legitimate" color than that of, say, Maroon, because it's such a common color used in our society for many years... especially popular with little girls and bubblegum. But it's really no more special than Slate or Beige.

[Half Man Half Wit]

Just by looking at this, it's clear just how relative colors appear. If I asked you to designate a pink tile from that color wheel, you might have some trouble deciding. But if I pointed to one of the light (tinted) reds or violets, and said that was pink, you probably wouldn't disagree.
I would actually locate pink somewhere within the purples -- interestingly, while it's not mentioned in the English wiki, the German version agrees with my assessment, defining it as a purple because it stimulates L- as well as S-cones; however, German does not greatly differentiate between rose and pink, the latter being described in the wiki as a 'rose with a stronger blue portion'.

[glas onion]

Regarding the observation of modern Welsh using English colour taxonomy - I believe the same may be true in Irish. I have a vague memory of noticing that old poems used the word "liath" - grey - for what we would consider blue. But nowadays the word "gorm" corresponds closely to English "blue". Apart from "duine gorm" which means a black person, not a blue person!

...the Irish word for "Pink" is Bán-Dearg. White-Red.

[Annie-Xmas]

One thing that has annoyed me for years is that there is no twelveth color. We have white-black-grey, red-blue-yellow, orange-green-purple, and pink-brown-:confused:

[cmyk]

I would actually locate pink somewhere within the purples -- interestingly, while it's not mentioned in the English wiki, the German version agrees with my assessment, defining it as a purple because it stimulates L- as well as S-cones; however, German does not greatly differentiate between rose and pink, the latter being described in the wiki as a 'rose with a stronger blue portion'.

Exactly my point, the term 'pink' applies to a great portion of the tinted red to violet section. There is no objective demarkation. If you did a study, handing out color wheels (with a continuous spectrum, not the tiled one in my example) to a room full of people, and asked them to draw a boundary surrounding only the color pink, you'd get wildly different shapes, but likely all in the same general area. Some might draw too far toward what some might consider too salmon. Others might tread a little too far into lavender. While, yet there might be a whole conservative set that leave out what many would still consider to be 'pink.'

[cplif]

I would think that color names issue from use, and thus concience or need. While Inuit language seems to contain several tens of qualities of snow (words) I can easily imagine that great differences between Irish color perception and Tuareg color perception have transpired through language. In the same way the word for "slate" in the desert is as useless as the word for sand song in Seattle

[Kyla]

Russian has a similar phenomenon: light blue is голубой* and dark blue is синий.

I understand that Ukrainian has two words for different shades of green. Russia does not? Bulgarian just has one word for every color, afaik. Синьо is all shades of blue, but you can use modifiers to make it dark or light.

[Acsenray]

Bulgarian just has one word for every color, afaik.

:confused:

Under what definition of "color"?

[kanicbird]

WAG, pink is for girls, the name of the light shade of red is well known while the other light shades of blue, green, whatever, is not set by something as popular as association with 1/2 of the population.

[Annie-Xmas]

Exactly my point, the term 'pink' applies to a great portion of the tinted red to violet section. There is no objective demarkation. If you did a study, handing out color wheels (with a continuous spectrum, not the tiled one in my example) to a room full of people, and asked them to draw a boundary surrounding only the color pink, you'd get wildly different shapes, but likely all in the same general area. Some might draw too far toward what some might consider too salmon. Others might tread a little too far into lavender. While, yet there might be a whole conservative set that leave out what many would still consider to be 'pink.'

I've always thought that purple was the color that kept its identy the best. Lilac, lavendar, magenta, plum, puce--all are considered shades of purple, not shades of the color you add to it (red, blue, brown, black)

[yabob]

WAG, pink is for girls, the name of the light shade of red is well known while the other light shades of blue, green, whatever, is not set by something as popular as association with 1/2 of the population.
We've kicked around the "pink is for girls" thing a couple of times, too. There's some evidence that the association is fairly modern (last century or two). In which case, at the time color names were evolving, pink would not have been exclusively "for girls".

[Chronos]

While Inuit language seems to contain several tens of qualities of snow (words)...This factoid gets bandied about so much, but people seem to overlook that English has tens of words for snow, too. Even discounting words that are etymologically related, you've got
Snow
Flakes
White stuff
Drifts
Powder
Hardpack
Slush
Flurry
Blizzard
Avalanche
Graupel
That's eleven, just off the top of my head.

[foolsguinea]

One thing that has annoyed me for years is that there is no twelveth color. We have white-black-grey, red-blue-yellow, orange-green-purple, and pink-brown-:confused:Tan/beige? Silver? Octarine?:p

[Kobal2]

WAG, pink is for girls, the name of the light shade of red is well known while the other light shades of blue, green, whatever, is not set by something as popular as association with 1/2 of the population.

Pink has only been "for girls" for less than a century, and only in the Western world. Before that (wikipedia lists the 1920s), pink (red for blood/passion/violence, white for innocence) was for boys, and blue (a "softer" colour) was for girls. For example, the Virgin Mary is often depicted wearing blue. IIRC Cecil did a column on this.

Non-western nations never had that code.

[The Tao's Revenge]

This factoid gets bandied about so much, but people seem to overlook that English has tens of words for snow, too. Even discounting words that are etymologically related, you've got
Snow
Flakes
White stuff
Drifts
Powder
Hardpack
Slush
Flurry
Blizzard
Avalanche
Graupel
That's eleven, just off the top of my head.

True, also accourding to Cecil (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/263/what-are-the-nine-eskimo-words-for-snow), disregarding his choice of name for the Inuit, part of the reason Inuit have so many words for snow is because the langauge is heavily reliant on suffixes, prefixes, and the like.

Whole phrases are rendered into single words. To compare it to english like that you'd have to count every possible phrase that uses the word snow.

[j666]

Why isn't orange "dark yellow"?
The same reason it isn't Pale Red (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=244189)

And it is widely accepted that "pink" originally referred to the flower and later to the color of the flower, as remarked earlier.

[Acsenray]

True, also accourding to Cecil (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/263/what-are-the-nine-eskimo-words-for-snow), disregarding his choice of name for the Inuit

"Eskimo" is a perfectly good term when speaking about languages.

[The Tao's Revenge]

"Eskimo" is a perfectly good term when speaking about languages.

Even if I give you that, he used the word for more then just langauge, but that's not really related to color perceptions and names. So lets let it go.