You must unlearn what you have learned about colors as we know them in everyday life.
Color names are relative approximations applied for the sake of practicality. My wager is that Pink was a color commonly used enough in western culture to warrant it a very prominent name. Etymology Online says that the word “pink” was borrowed a flower “pale rose in color”, also perhaps from the notion of perforated petals or being small, as in a pinky.
Anyway, what matters is it seems we get our color names from the things around us that remind us of that color.
Just by looking at this, it’s clear just how relative colors appear. If I asked you to designate a pink tile from that color wheel, you might have some trouble deciding. But if I pointed to one of the light (tinted) reds or violets, and said that was pink, you probably wouldn’t disagree.
This color wheel only represents Hue (the primary spectrum colors) and their tints (lightened) and shades (darkened). It is missing saturation, which saps the vividness of a color toward a neutral tone… toward grayscale.
Anyway, my point being, I think Pink seems like a more “legitimate” color than that of, say, Maroon, because it’s such a common color used in our society for many years… especially popular with little girls and bubblegum. But it’s really no more special than Slate or Beige.
I would actually locate pink somewhere within the purples – interestingly, while it’s not mentioned in the English wiki, the German version agrees with my assessment, defining it as a purple because it stimulates L- as well as S-cones; however, German does not greatly differentiate between rose and pink, the latter being described in the wiki as a ‘rose with a stronger blue portion’.
One thing that has annoyed me for years is that there is no twelveth color. We have white-black-grey, red-blue-yellow, orange-green-purple, and pink-brown-
Exactly my point, the term ‘pink’ applies to a great portion of the tinted red to violet section. There is no objective demarkation. If you did a study, handing out color wheels (with a continuous spectrum, not the tiled one in my example) to a room full of people, and asked them to draw a boundary surrounding only the color pink, you’d get wildly different shapes, but likely all in the same general area. Some might draw too far toward what some might consider too salmon. Others might tread a little too far into lavender. While, yet there might be a whole conservative set that leave out what many would still consider to be ‘pink.’
I would think that color names issue from use, and thus concience or need. While Inuit language seems to contain several tens of qualities of snow (words) I can easily imagine that great differences between Irish color perception and Tuareg color perception have transpired through language. In the same way the word for “slate” in the desert is as useless as the word for sand song in Seattle
I understand that Ukrainian has two words for different shades of green. Russia does not? Bulgarian just has one word for every color, afaik. Синьо is all shades of blue, but you can use modifiers to make it dark or light.
WAG, pink is for girls, the name of the light shade of red is well known while the other light shades of blue, green, whatever, is not set by something as popular as association with 1/2 of the population.
I’ve always thought that purple was the color that kept its identy the best. Lilac, lavendar, magenta, plum, puce–all are considered shades of purple, not shades of the color you add to it (red, blue, brown, black)
We’ve kicked around the “pink is for girls” thing a couple of times, too. There’s some evidence that the association is fairly modern (last century or two). In which case, at the time color names were evolving, pink would not have been exclusively “for girls”.
This factoid gets bandied about so much, but people seem to overlook that English has tens of words for snow, too. Even discounting words that are etymologically related, you’ve got
Snow
Flakes
White stuff
Drifts
Powder
Hardpack
Slush
Flurry
Blizzard
Avalanche
Graupel
That’s eleven, just off the top of my head.
Pink has only been “for girls” for less than a century, and only in the Western world. Before that (wikipedia lists the 1920s), pink (red for blood/passion/violence, white for innocence) was for boys, and blue (a “softer” colour) was for girls. For example, the Virgin Mary is often depicted wearing blue. IIRC Cecil did a column on this.
True, also accourding to Cecil, disregarding his choice of name for the Inuit, part of the reason Inuit have so many words for snow is because the langauge is heavily reliant on suffixes, prefixes, and the like.
Whole phrases are rendered into single words. To compare it to english like that you’d have to count every possible phrase that uses the word snow.
Even if I give you that, he used the word for more then just langauge, but that’s not really related to color perceptions and names. So lets let it go.
