# How closely do color terms boundaries mesh between similar languages? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 24, 2012, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-closely-do-color-terms-boundaries-mesh-between-similar-languages/638772 "2012-10-24T22:41:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2012, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-closely-do-color-terms-boundaries-mesh-between-similar-languages/638772/21 "2012-10-27T00:41:17Z")
> [@DesertDog](#): > > I like the girl/boy color chart on the bottom. I’ve often said unless they’re a color professional (artist, printer, or some such) men only recognize the colors in a crayon box–eight not sixty-four. The only exceptions are pink and tan. I at least recognized my favorite color, Burnt Umber, before they nixed it. I liked that the crayon looked black but drew brown. I was a weird kid. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2012, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-closely-do-color-terms-boundaries-mesh-between-similar-languages/638772/22 "2012-10-27T01:27:18Z")
Is the blue/indigo thing analogous to red/pink in English? People know that pink is "really’ just light red, but culturally it functions as a separate color, with a totally different set of connotations. I’ve wondered if the way pink seems to be different from red in a more meaningful way than any other lighter tint is entirely psychological. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2012, 1:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-closely-do-color-terms-boundaries-mesh-between-similar-languages/638772/23 "2012-10-27T01:45:37Z")
Indigo is represented spectrally, beyond blue. Purple is not spectral, but red+blue (the ends). Pink isn’t either. It’s sorta desaturated red, but weird. Pink show up in relatively few languages, one could speculate why. IME most people don’t know the difference between indigo and purple, and call it all purple or blue. ---
**Author:** ![chacoguy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/50afbb/32.png) [@chacoguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chacoguy)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2012, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-closely-do-color-terms-boundaries-mesh-between-similar-languages/638772/24 "2012-10-27T03:55:02Z")
Let’s talk about Dark Yellow. ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2012, 4:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-closely-do-color-terms-boundaries-mesh-between-similar-languages/638772/25 "2012-10-27T04:29:01Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > That is telling us that tetrachromacy may not really exist. Agreed. That is one possibility, and the evidence for tetrachromacy isn’t very strong. > [@](#): > > This is a misleading way of conceptualizing visual processing. “We” are not waiting at the other end of our brain to see what visual information it eventually delivers to “us”. There is not an “end product” of visual processing, and we do not have to wait until all the visual processing of something is done before we finally see whatever it is that is in front of our eyes. (The same applies to auditory processing.) No, it’s not misleading at all. Even _involuntary_ reaction times to different kinds of stimulus are different. Your brain lies to you. You don’t see many of the things you think you see, and your brain hides a lot of the things you actually do see. Unprocessed vision signals would be incredibly confusing if you viewed the raw feed. Just the saccades your eyes make would make the worst cinema jerky-cam you ever saw look like a smooth tracking shot in comparison. The actual information you take in is not terribly precise. Optical illusions are largely the result of the intensive processing your brain does of the actual stimuli you receive. > [@](#): > > I do not think this at all a generally accepted view these days. Maybe we perceive some things in subtly different ways, but the real differences are not in perceptual experience, but in how we conceive of the things we see, and express out responses to them verbally (and otherwise). > > I am fairly sure that experiments have shown that people from all cultures are equally good at distinguishing any two arbitrary colors, even ones very close in hue. Their language (and perhaps other aspects of culture and experience) may affect how they conceive of colors, how they respond to them, and even how they remember them, but it does not affect basic perceptual discrimination. If you listen to the podcast I linked to earlier, they talk about an experiment that was run where the color displayed was glaringly, obviously different from the others, and the people they were testing couldn’t see the difference. The prompt was simple: which one is different. The other displays all had the same color; only one was different. The subjects of that culture were unable to point out the different color even though to all of the researches from Western cultures the difference was absolutely unmistakable. Most of the references I had that discussed these kinds of things are textbooks I had in college, so I don’t have any at hand. However, I did find an abridged section of a text on [Google Books](http://books.google.co.jp/books?hl=en&lr=&id=rG1BnQeT9L4C&oi=fnd&pg=PA287&dq=color+perception+in+different+cultures&ots=Qn7x8T65T4&sig=pEhj_yZHZZ7IqCW46F8z2wbGClY&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=color%20perception%20in%20different%20cultures&f=false) > [@](#): > > You can see the difference too, can’t you? Indeed, you apparently even have words (blue, indigo) that differentiate the different colors; it is just that one of those is a word we rarely use in English. This is a linguistic difference, not a perceptual one. (I will bet you, also, that a Japanese person will readily agree that his “blue” and his “indigo” are a lot more similar to one another than either is to yellow or red.) It is probably not simply a linguistic difference. You can infer not just from the way people describe things, but also by the way they _use_ colors that the perceptual categories are different. Green lights in the US are much more uniform in hue than the 青 signal lights in Japan, which range anywhere from quite green to an aquamarine most English speakers would call blue. That implies that there is a wider range of acceptable variability in color that is consistent with the terminology used in Japanese. They don’t just call it the same color, they either don’t seem to notice or don’t seem to care about the variation in hue. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2012, 7:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-closely-do-color-terms-boundaries-mesh-between-similar-languages/638772/26 "2012-10-27T07:09:28Z")
Yeah, but the green lights are more uniform even though we have a lot more colors we would call green. If there isn’t an actual codified standard, there is an unofficial one. I’ve been told that green traffic lights have a little bit of blue in them, and red has a little bit of yellow, and that this is to help those with red-green color blindness. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2012, 3:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-closely-do-color-terms-boundaries-mesh-between-similar-languages/638772/27 "2012-10-27T15:14:55Z")
> [@Sleel](#): > > Agreed. That is one possibility, and the evidence for tetrachromacy isn’t very strong. The idea that _some_ women can express 4 cone pigments is pretty well established. The idea that they can get anything functional out of it is the question. There’s some decent evidence, it’s just not found all the time and if it exists it may not be that strong or represent a functional advantage. Color boundaries can also be expressed in reaction time. Culture A can make quick same/different judgments between green and blue, but slower with blue/blue. Culture B, with no green/blue distinction, would have similar speeds across the whole range. ---
**Author:** ![Terminus\_Est](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terminus_est/32/3087_2.png) [@Terminus\_Est](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terminus_Est)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2012, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-closely-do-color-terms-boundaries-mesh-between-similar-languages/638772/28 "2012-10-27T19:46:06Z")
> [@Sleel](#): > > If you listen to the podcast I linked to earlier, they talk about an experiment that was run where the color displayed was glaringly, obviously different from the others, and the people they were testing couldn’t see the difference. The prompt was simple: which one is different. The other displays all had the same color; only one was different. The subjects of that culture were unable to point out the different color even though to all of the researches from Western cultures the difference was absolutely unmistakable. Here’s a [video from the BBC](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b71rT9fU-I) that shows this point, probably using the same tribe. (relevant portion begins at 3:00). They could easily differentiate between subtle shades of green, while a green square in a field of blue squares stymied them. ---
**Author:** ![Terminus\_Est](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terminus_est/32/3087_2.png) [@Terminus\_Est](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terminus_Est)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2012, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-closely-do-color-terms-boundaries-mesh-between-similar-languages/638772/29 "2012-10-27T21:07:52Z")
I’ve now listened to the Radiolab podcast. It does indeed use the same tribe, the Himba, as in the BBC video. Having no separate word for blue, they are slow to differentiate between blue and green. The video further goes on to show that they can easily distinguish different shades of green. The video shows the same color pattern that the Himba saw, so you can judge for yourself. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-closely-do-color-terms-boundaries-mesh-between-similar-languages/638772.md?page=1)