I would call that color fuchsia.
How are those tests done? Because to make an analogy to sound, any tone-deaf flusie can distinguish sounds of a different tone (or different timbre or different linguistic allophones) if they’re played right after each other. But with a 30 second pause you need actual training/experience/culture to be successful.
If color is anything like sound, then there is the potential for different people to really see colors in different ways. (However, the names for colors would not be the only factor. Bigger than that would be the actual use of colors in your society. If you only have one name for yellow but color-code your pie charts in different shades, then you’ll grow up to have a very clear conscious distinction between the various hues. I strongly suspect that people from times or societies that don’t have rich paints or Photoshop see the world more plain.)
Ok, wise guy. Find one of your fancy-pants monitors and do the same MS Paint experiment.
I didn’t mean to claim that each and every single person on the planet sees color in the same way. The claim is that there are no systematic cultural effect on color matching.
Are you saying there are systematic cultural effects on sound matching?
That’s pretty much the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which no Linguist takes seriously any longer. It has been debunked by empirical research. I don’t have cites at my fingertips, but enough information about it can be found online pretty easily.
(I should offer the caveat that some Linguists have lately begun to allow for certain much weakened versions of the hypothesis, but none would countenance the idea that color vocabulary actually affects the ease with which a person can distinguish colors.)
-FrL-
Do you have any evidence of this ever happening? Where a person didn’t look at the color itself on the can label? And then upon opening a can and not finding the right color, couldn’t just return it for the right color?
Of course not. Though such a situation wouldn’t shock me at all these days, I was extrapolating as I’m probably too often wont to do. But the first part of my post stands:
… as far as “I’ve heard it explained” (years ago in a Q&A column not unlike Cecil’s, though not as thorough). I suspect the fundamental reason for the funny names starts with “trade” and ends with “mark”.
I agree.
Try this image: Image Upper.com - Free Image Hosting - View Image (1024x3904 gif, 436 KB)
It’s a row of yellow steps from 0% to 50% (left-right), adjusted for gamma values from 1 to 4 (top-down). They’re alternating with a linear gradient dithered from pure yellow and black.
Squint at the image so that the dither patterns dissolve into uniform blotches. Make sure your browser or image viewer isn’t re-scaling the size (you need to see the pixels 1:1 for this to work properly).
Scroll down through the image. Somewhere (depending on your monitor) you’ll find an area where the brightnesses of the stripes match those above and below. This is because in theory, a pattern of 25% pure yellow and 75% black for example should look the same as a uniform yellow area with a brightness of 0.25. You may want to screen out the surrounding areas with your hands to avoid distraction from the other colors.
Any deviation between the red and green response curves of your monitor will stand out as difference in hue between the stripes. A factor of 1.1 between the gamma curves of the two channels already becomes a quite noticable discoloration. A simulated example: Image Upper.com - Free Image Hosting - View Image On the left it’s neutral, on the right with the red gamma increased by 0.1. Could this type of color cast be what you see?
Absolutely. The Japanese can’t hear the difference between L and R. Americans (or just me) can’t hear the difference between Chinese tones (which is unfortunate, because they’re the essence of the language that I’m trying to study). Like I said, if sounds are played immediately after each other anyone can hear a difference (while the sound is still encoded in a complex way), but with a pause the information is compressed by memory and the differences are erased.
People from Thailand (I think) have much higher incidence of perfect pitch (ability to name notes, w/o a reference) because their language is pitch-based. This is a direct analogy to our ability to name colors. Many of us take for granted the ability to see a color and name it with precision. Quite conceivably if we were not brought up on Crayola and modern gamuts we wouldn’t be able to do it. Fundamentally.
But, I’m not sure what the implication would be.
Ahh… I feel like you just changed subjects on me. I should have specified, though, that I meant “pitch matching.”
But I’ll do some thinking about whether your point concerning sound matching is relevant to my argument or not. It’s too late in the evening for me to think it through right now. 
-FrL-
This color wheel was made from names given to random colors by test subjects. You can type a term into the text box to filter for color terms used, such as “yellow,” or “dark.”
It’s very interesting.
Interestingly enough, I may stand corrected about whether color terms affect color perception.
Some people think some research is beginning to appear to indicate that they do.
-FrL-
and haze is drawn from our collectives eyes to vindicate my sight… in time
ahh, were it often so