English not having “a word” for something isn’t exactly the case. Semantically, one considers the term (in this case light blue) to represent the idea. In essence, the term is the word, even though the term may contain more than one word.
You actually had a teacher tell you the primary colors are yellow, magenta and cyan? How old (young) are you?
In the late 70s, I was taught Red, Yellow and Blue, as was my son a few years ago. I told him to go back the next day and tell his teacher the primary colors were cyan, magenta and yellow.
I think that in this day and age of computers-and especially color printers-that cyan, magenta and yellow are pretty commonplace, but 30 years ago, I doubt that anyone outside of the printing industry would even know that the terms cyan and magenta existed.
Another thought…Crayola’s idea of Blue and Red aren’t even close to Cyan and Magenta. As a child, I always wondered why Yellow and Blue crayons didn’t mix to make a very good Green.
We have terms for light blue and light green. (Two of them are light blue and light green.) If we had no terms for them, all we could do is point at the sky or the pistachio ice cream and go, “Uh, like that, y’know?”
What we don’t have is universally accepted words that communicate the idea of light blue, light green without the words blue or green in back of them. The only place you see sky or seafoam or such standing alone is in little boxes under the models in the spring J. Crew catalog.
Neither are the internet’s idea of Blue (hexadecimal #0000FF) and Red (hex #FF0000).
I’m 18. Of course my teacher did a lot of stuff in optics and computing and such before she started teaching first grade. 
And my teacher knew crayola red and blue weren’t magenta and cyan or even close, she just accepted that it was “close enough” for our purposes. Of course I don’t specifically remember this speech, I visited said teacher recently (turned out she moved across the country to the same town as my by a stroke of coincidence) and she CLAIMS she told us that, she could very well be lying.
And yes, I very well know I probably just vapourized all credibility I may ever have on this board by admitting my age.
While it is true that cyan magenta and yellow provide a larger color space than red yellow and blue, RYB is a perfectly fine set of primary colors. There is nothing technically special about CMY color space that I know of.
pffffft
I’m gonna have to figure out how to work that one into a conversation…!
Well, you can’t produce a full range of color with RYB. Red is formed by combining magenta with a little bit of cyan, just as blue is formed by mixing a little magenta into cyan. Because of this limitation, it can’t be used in printing to make a full spectrum of color (or at least the closest approximation of full color modern technology can produce). Magenta and cyan are pure in that you can’t mix any other colors to produce them.
RYB is fine for Kindergarten purposes, since the kids are working with a box of 8 crayons, and RYB are three out of the eight.
This is precisely, what I meant when I said that RYB color space is not as large as that of CYM. To be honest, I am not as familiar with subtractive color space as I am with additive color space. If subtractive color space is anything like additive color space, then the true primaries are arbitrary since there are always colors that can’t be made by mixing the colors you choose as primaries.
In other words, you can’t produce a full range of color with CMY either.
Another word for light blue is cerulean. But it’s used almost exclusively to refer to the color of the sky.
Lime is actually a yellow green – if you just a light green, try celadon. Pretty obscure word; it’s the name of a glaze for pottery but can also be used for the color of the glaze which is a light green.
BTW, Korean doesn’t have a basic color word for pink. It has the other ten, though.
If you don’t count 분홍색, then, no, Korean doesn’t.
I’m not sure I totally agree that “light blue” has as much semantic independence as “pink”. There is an objective difference in the fact that “pink” is a lexeme, while “light blue” is a predictable derivative of “blue”.
Does light blue strike you as being different from blue? If so, then the entire term is semantically one unit.
If pink being a standard colour disturbs you, why is orange and brown OK (you list them among the standard colours)?
Orange = Red + yellow, with a smidgen more red
Brown = Erm…
It’s been mentioned in the thread, but no clear dinstinction made, that pink is not light red.
It’s actually a light red that has had some light blue added. So it’s somwhere between light red and light purple.
First of all, it seems that some of you don’t understand that RGB is additive and RYB is subractive, and the distinction isn’t arbitrary. You can’t compare Crayola colors with those seen on your monitor; they’re just two completely separate animals.
And why hasn’t anyone mentioned lavender? I’d say it’s just about as universally understood as pink.
I don’t disagree, but it strikes me that derived semantic units are less entrenched than independent ones. “Walking” is a much more vital concept in English than “strolling along the streets of Beirut while eating an apple with the left hand”, though both are, according to your definition, semantic units. Additionally, if you asked someone to name as many actions as they can think of, “walking” will likely come up much sooner than “strolling along the streets of Beirut while eating an apple with the left hand” (if the latter ever does come up). By a similar (but less drastic) token, a person asked to list off colors is much more likely to go for pink before light blue.
You’re right that RGB is different, but RYB isn’t a proper colour space anyway - it’s a makeshift one that works OK for primary school art.
Funny that - because I’d primarily associate the term ‘lavender’ with the herb - it might take me a second or two to grok the context and understand you meant a colour. I’d say mauve or (possibly interestingly) lilac instead, or maybe just purple.
-Which I think it a fairly apt demonstration that these things are significantly cultural.
I see the term orange hasn’t come up in this thread yet, and it should - before English speakers were exposed to the fruit called ‘orange’, we had no common word for exactly that colour - it would have been described as ‘scarlet’ or ‘flame red’, or something - and objects that colour would just be lumped in the categories of red, ochre or yellow, depending on the shade.
Interesting. I associate lavender with the gem.
I didn’t even know there was one. You don’t mean amethyst?