No, it’s quite real. The Pitjantjatjara of Australia have “one”, “two”, “three”, “two-two”, “three-two”, “three-three” and “many”. The Piraha of Brazil have “roughly one”, “a small quantity”, and “many”.
And even more weirdness, from a fairly technologically advanced “tribe”, the people of France 
Their word for 80 is “quatre-vingt”, meaning “four twenties”. Would that mean they can only perceive up to 20 units, and then had to add a multiplier to it? Ha! If we do apply this language thing to reality based on numbers it does seem that there is no argument that can hold water other than it. One would think that numbers, in most cases, would be more important to have exact terminology for than colors, from a survival/economic/political standpoint, whereas gradations in color would be mostly poetic/descriptive/artistic. There are arguments out there that fine gradation in color perception were important for prehistoric humans for finding edible rather than poisonous fruits, but that ability was concentrated mostly in women, who were the gatherers. This arguments is supported today by the fact that the vast majority of red-green colorblind people are men, as the ability to see these colors is somehow tied to the X chromosome. It could have been possible in many non-literate societies, I think, that only women had terms for specific gradations of color between, the differences in red shades between a poisonous and an edible berry. Or perhaps they just used the name they had for the berry itself as the name for the color. It is interesting to me that such basic differences, such as the difference between green and blue, are not defined in some early literature – when the differences in kinds of ships, in types of armor, and in such precise descriptions of physical attributes (the famous “fat around the kidneys” line) were so clearly stated in it. Within the Iliad is a reference to a cheese grater, for gosh sakes, but not to the color blue – how odd is that? I’m not an ancient Greek scholar, so I don’t know if perhaps many words or specific terms were used for these precise, idiosyncratic descriptions. It would be interested to study that.
One poster – I can’t remember who, brought up the “color spectrum” theory, that perhaps the precise naming of colors within the spectrum is really something that comes late in the evolution of language, rather than early as we would expect it. I think part of the reason that we would expect, especially, the Ancient Greeks to have precise color definitions is that the literature that survives is largely poetry, and poetry, at least in the modern imagination, is full of descriptions, including color And while the Iliad and Odyssey are poems, they are perhaps poems with a different original intent than our modern art-poems. Poetry was a medium of communication, of myth-learning, and an aid to remember history in a largely pre-literate society. Actions of heroes, what happened to who and when, etc, even if mythical or partially mythical, would be more important than what people were wearing when it happened (unless what they were wearing offended the gods). But then why the references to the wine-dark see, gray (or blue, depending on translation)-eyed Athena, and even the (supposedly erroneously translated) blue-haired Poseidon within the text? Well, it still is poetry, and many of those attributes are repeated over and over to fit within the hexameter line, to make it easier to remember and, possibly more pleasant/easier to sing? I’m not sure.
It may seem extraordinary to us that simple gradations in color are not defined in early literature, as “recently” as 2800-2900 years ago. But perhaps gradations in color is really a very modern evolution of language, even though the perception of the gradations has been unchanged for tens of thousands of years. Again, I’m not sure. I’ll try to find more material on this and read up.
I’d love to know what the ancient Egyptians had for color-language. Anybody know?
What other startling late evolutions in language are out there, other than high-number nomenclature and color-naming? C’mon, board, somebody out there must know!
Actually, this sort of thing is quite common, especially near the Mediterranean. The standard explanation I’ve seen attached is that people learned to count on their toes as well as fingers, making twenty the “natural” base to use.
I believe counting by 20’s is a Celtic use, one that happened to carry over from Gaulish into French.
So, saying that something is sky-colored doesn’t count as saying something is blue?
Not as long as the “-colored” is present. When English went from “orange-colored” to “orange”, it had gained a new color word, but not until then.
This link seems to be exciting a lot of folks, and showing up on a lot of threads here:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=630165
Specifically, for this thread:
*"Key words from the master of Greek tragedy…
Speaker B: And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle’s songs, that wakes up those who are asleep…
These words were written by the Greek dramatist Sophocles, and are the only known fragment we have of his lost play Epigonoi (literally “The Progeny”), the story of the siege of Thebes. Until last week’s hi-tech analysis of ancient scripts at Oxford University, no one knew of their existence, and this is the first time they have been published."* (Emphasis mine).
And, from the original column:
*"…7. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains a term for purple, pink, orange, grey, or some combination of these.
Berlin and Kay also found that the number of basic color terms tends to increase with the complexity of the civilization. They speculated that this explains the relative poverty of color terminology among the ancients–e.g., the Greeks had terms only for black, white, yellow, and red because theirs was a relatively uncomplicated culture, at least from a technological standpoint…"* (Again, emphasis mine).
Just found it interesting (I wonder if Berlin and Kay will also do so?), and was looking for a chance to resurrect this thread.
best to all,
plynck
How on earth could any human being count on their toes?
You can count on your fingers by articulating them, ie moving a finger into an ‘on’ or an ‘off’ state. Are you suggesting that ancient humans could do this with their toes as well? It seems quite unlikely to me…
John
I would guess that you do not have agile toes as some of us seem to. My wife teases me and says that with toes as long as mine I should be able to type with them. Not quite, but I can grip a pencil, etc. which some folks consider fairly dexterous . . . for toes anyway.
It is well known that many cultures do (or did) count on their toes and consequently reckon in 20’s. The Mayan, for example. Anyway, it is not necessary to articulate digits to count on them.
A news report of a translation is of very, very little evidentiary value. The original could easily be “Tyrian” or “murex”, for example. (The “-dyed”, frankly, makes me almost sure of it.)
Well, since no one else has said it, I guess I will.
Do you really want extrapolate too much from the color descriptions of a blind man?
Although Cecil stepped deeply into doo-doo with his Eskimos and snow columns he was on the right track when he posited that a group comes up with specialized terms to meet its needs.
Cultures that didn’t need to do anything with color wouldn’t necessary have a word to describe the color. If you asked primitive man “what color is the sky” it’s simply a question he wouldn’t have bothered to contemplate. OTOH, primitive man might have had a host of words to describe the sky in other ways:
The sky looks good for hunting
The sky looks like it will rain tomorrow
The sky looks like I’d better take cover right now
etc.
Does one need to name colors? Colors could be named metaphorically. Red dye could be called blood; Brown dye, poop; Blue dye, lilac; etc… 
Or it could be “porphureos”.
"Ancient Greek color terminology is notoriously complex (vol. 1 of Maxwell-Stuart 1981 is devoted to one word, glaukos). Consider porphureos, commonly translated “purple”; it is famous as the royal color, the unauthorized use of which could be interpreted as treason (Gage 1993, p. 25). In addition to purple, lexicons list as its meanings dark red, crimson, and russet (Liddell & Scott 1889, s.v.). Therefore we can see why Homer uses it to describe blood, but why is the stormy sea porphureos (Iliad, I.482)? And why the rainbow (Iliad, XVII.547)? As Liddell & Scott (1889, s.v.) remark, “the word does not imply any definite color.” Rather, for Homer’s audience, the word referred first to the gleaming, glancing play of light on disturbed water, and by extension to any shimmering, lustrous, lurid, or glittering play of color; “royal purple” had this quality (Cunliffe 1924, s.v.; see also Gage 1993, pp. 16, 25-26, for more on porphureos). "
Which, frankly, partially undermines my earlier thoughts, :o although I think that it also demonstrates that the Ancient Greeks had more than a basic color terminology as stated in the original column.
The gist of this linked article, and I find it fascinating, is that other older cultures use color descriptions to refer to more than mere reflectance; that color can refer to moistness or life, to our environment. Perhaps having more descriptions for color is not so much due to our increasing industrialization as it is to our separating ourselves from the natural world.
best to all,
plynck
As long as I’m eating my words…
That was a dumb statement, sort of like the head of the US Patent Office once saying that they should close their doors because everything had already been invented… Of course there will be more color names.
It dawned on me that the number of color names does increase with innovations in technology. Anyone who works with computer graphics or with printing will recognize something like R124G67B56, or something similar using CMYK. Anyone can walk into Sherwin Williams with a paint code, and walk off with the exact shade of paint that they wanted. The fact that these are numbers doesn’t negate that they can identify a color to a high degree of specificity.
best to all,
plynck
We have this, to some degree, too. Modern Americans use “silver” and “irridescent”, for instance, as color words.
And I’m not sure that RGB values count in quite the same way. The article refers to “basic” color names, so that “pink”, for instance, is considered basic, but not “light blue”. An RGB value, if anything, would be even further from being a basic color name.