The etymology of the word orange is really, really complex and it didn’t necessarily come from the fruit directly.
And people call colors all kinds of non-consistent things; red hair can be pretty red, or not. Sometimes it’s more of a “fancy brown.”
I don’t see any links to modern color studies. Because, as far as I know, the cultural impact of color naming is pretty much accepted science. The experiment I saw on video involved asking you to pick which color is different in a set of colors swatches. The tribe in the study had problems distinguishing what obviously appeared green and blue to me, but had no problem with two different shades of green that I could not distinguish. And my perceptions matched with what they said. Unless the whole thing was staged, that seems pretty definitive.
Here’s the video clip. I’m sorry that’s not an official clip from the BBC or YouTube, but this was the easiest copy I could find. If someone else finds a better copy, feel free to link it.
I also hope someone can provide an actual paper from the study being performed.
This paper supports a previous finding that infants can differentiate between blue and green, detracting from the hypothesis that the division is largely linguistic (although not that it could be learned rather than innate).
On the other hand, this paper shows that ability to distinguish between shades of blue is enhanced in Russian speakers vs Engish speakers. Russian apparently has no single word for blue but different words for various shades. From the paper:
“English speakers, of course, also can subdivide blue stimuli into light and dark. In fact, English speakers as a group drew nearly the same boundary as did the Russian speakers in our work. The critical difference in this case is not that English speakers cannot distinguish between light and dark blues, but rather that Russian speakers cannot avoid distinguishing them: they must do so to speak Russian in a conventional manner.”
It may not be widely supported, but it’s more the kind of thing I was looking for…
I never suggested anyone couldn’t see the whole spectrum - and I didn’t mean to imply that their brains rendered some colours invisible - what I’m interested in is how grouping colours in different ways could effect their mental view of the world. And I’d like to see a chart that shows those colour groupings, so I could adopt those linguistic definitions for a short while, to understand how that would shift your perception.
Not exactly, there is significant variance across individuals within gender and genetic populations. The color space sensitivity of a Japanese population sample is measurably different than a Norwegian sample. The data that we engineers use is statistically weighted based on human trials, with all of the potential induced uncertainty that needs to be taken into account (e.g. French lab subjects in 1931 may not accurately represent the same demographic as 2013 Beijing). Different genetic populations also have different variances in colorblindness types and quantities.
Human eye response
…and the math we use in the industry weighted by human variance.
How the role of color in culture and language plays vs biology in each others development over time is up for lively debate.
It makes picking out bathroom paint damn aggravating, let me tell ya 
Your son would fit in well in Ireland - we don’t use the word “yellow” for traffic lights; only amber or orange.
As many here have noted, Japanese uses the word “aoi” (blue) for the green traffic light. But in fact many Japanese traffic lights (especially non-official, temporary, lights) really are bright blue, even to western eyes.
So is the color in the middle here yellow or orange, if you had to pick one? I’d say that’s about the yellow–probably a little more orange–you get here on Chicago traffic signals. It’s closest to “amber,” of course, if you define amber as the point between yellow and orange. But of the rainbow colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, (indigo), violet), I think yellow is closest. (And it is, looking at the numbers in Photoshop.)
Also, the markings on the road, at least here in Chicago, that are described as “yellow lines” are more orange than the middle light. (In fact, I would agree that the lines on the road are probably more orange than yellow.) And where do yellow cabs fit in? Yellow lights here are more yellow than that. (And, analyzing it in Photoshop, it turns out that color is almost dead center between yellow and orange, what you would call “amber,” but actually very slightly on the yellow side, so more yellow than orange.)
I don’t see quite the same color with both eyes. My left eye sees more blue in things, and my right eye sees more yellow. One of my brothers is the same way.
We don’t even have to leave English to see examples of this. For some reason, English-speakers consider, say, light blue and dark blue to be two different shades of the same color, but we have a separate word for “light red”, and don’t even think of it as the same color as red.
And if we’re going to talk about the colors of lines on the road, why not talk about the roads themselves? Asphalt roads are universally referred to as “black”, even when they’re only barely darker than the concrete sidewalks next to them.
I have perfect color perception. (Thanks for the link to the test).
I also once had a very persnickety boss who had formal training in color in design. When I used to prepare slides for him he once told me “Don’t use scarlet in slides, use carmine.” he had other rules for blue that I have now forgotten because some policy issue made our headline color purple, and blue didn’t contrast enough with purple that we were forbidden to use it. Hey, it was the 90s in the military. I was a powerpoint ranger.
We’ve only done this since the 1700s, though. Before that, pink was a flower not a colour.
“This suggests the possibility that not only did Homer lack a word for what we know as “blue”—he might never have perceived the color itself. To him, the sky really was bronze, and the sea really was the same color as wine.”
Assuming “bronze” to mean verdigris (the natural patina of copper alloys - think Statue of Liberty!) it seems to me that old Homer came pretty damn close.
One should probably also bear in mind that the ancient Greeks didn’t have much, if any, in the way of glassware. Wine in a ceramics bowl (or a tin cup) looks very dark - in a quick glance, one could indeed mistake it for black coffee. So “wine-coloured” would probably mean “dark” or “black” - pretty common descriptors for deep water (as in the Black Sea!)
A lot of the glassware that was available appears to have been colored, too; many of the truly-ancient pieces I’ve seen were green. Place red wine in a green cup, you sure won’t be seeing a lot of ruby shades.