Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language (2015)

http://nautil.us/issue/26/color/why-red-means-red-in-almost-every-language

by dnetesn • 10 years ago

80 80 10 years ago

woliveirajr2• 10 years ago

It would be interesting to see some color map for each of those groups.

Also, do parents who moved abroad have kids with different perception? And would have analysis in some genetic factors (as babies seem to indicate) and the cultural influence.

moron4hire2• 10 years ago

It's not a difference in perception, it's a difference in communication. Imagine a room full of people wearing "pink" shirts, and you want to call out specifically one of those people, but you don't know the word "salmon" in the context of a color of shirt. You absolutely see the difference in the colors of the shirt. Your lack of language does not change your perception. You know the color and you could pick it again when asked. You just have to go through convolutions to communicate the exact nature of the color to others.

OJFord2• 10 years ago

We absolutely can differ in perception.

As long as the boundaries are the same we can perceive something different, call it the same, and never be confused; all the while 'seeing' a completely different colour to one another.

SamBam• 10 years ago

The linguistic relativist's position (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) is specifically that people with different color words perceive colors differently.

It's mostly discredited now, but that's exactly the position being discussed in the article.

woliveirajr2• 10 years ago

But the article states that even babies, who don't express those knowledge verbally, can have different reaction.

In my experience, sample size=1, you don't talk that much with a baby about colors. The article doesn't explain details, and that made me wonder: is this genetic? Cultural? How does it goes when the parents have different cultures? Moving to another city/country changes that? Being in a nursery with caregivers of the same/different culture?

Once I read a discussion about teaching your child colors, and how some take longer to differentiate colors from the object, so that color is an attribute and not _the_ object. That's where this caught my attention.

coldtea2• 10 years ago

* His field had long espoused a theory called linguistic relativity, which held that language shapes perception. Color was the “parade example,” Kay says. His professors and textbooks taught that people could only recognize a color as categorically distinct from others if they had a word for it. (...) The two languages are as unrelated to each other historically as any two languages can be,” Kay says. And yet they seemed to give rise to a common way of seeing and thinking about color. Either he and Berlin had stumbled upon a one-in-a-million coincidence. Or the relativists were wrong.*

Or relativism is truer for less tangible things (like how we deal with societal and abstract notions based on our language) than about stuff we experience directly, like color.

rubber_duck• 10 years ago

Saying that you can only think about abstract things if you have words for them is tautological since abstractions build on language.

coldtea2• 10 years ago

Saying that you can only think about abstract things if you have words for them is tautological since abstractions build on language.

The actual relativist core is not about "only being able to think X if you have words for it" (which is bogus imho), it's about the "language shapes perception" part.

Besides, abstractions are not just built on/from language -- else they would be meaningless names. They are based on experiences -- which are not just experiences of actual tangible things but also of circumstances, common feelings, etc. Freedom for example, while an abstract notion, is painfully "tangible" as an experience when its taken away from you, whether you are Japanese or Irish, etc, so one would expect all cultures to form the relevant words to describe it (and that is the case).

Thus one could think of freedom even without having access to the word -- just by having in his mind the relevant sensation (as a mental picture, etc).

But even more so, a system of language (associated words and notions) also shapes how we approach freedom beyond the basic underlying sentiment.

gmfawcett• 10 years ago

Abstractions might benefit deeply from language, but I don't see a tautology here. I suspect that anyone who does a lot of abstract thinking (math, software design, visual arts, etc.) spends time engaging with abstractions that have no names or linguistic references, and which may never manifest in named constructs. It can be a relief to have such a "mental thing" become concrete enough to attract a name -- now we have more tools to manipulate it with, and we can communicate it more effectively -- but that doesn't always happen. And when it does, sometimes you have to discard some of the interesting parts in order to wedge the thing into a nameable compartment: it's not really the same abstraction any more.

In software design, sometimes I know that I am working within a certain project-specific "space" in my head that informs the decisions I'm making. It has structure, influenced by the structure of the project and by my problem-solving approach; but there aren't any words in there, and I'd be hard pressed to give it a better name than "a mental model." And yet it's a palpable "thing," it's often unique to the specific project, and it is useful in getting the work done -- I definitely notice when I get distracted and lose track of it, and recognize it when it I find it again.

I'm trying hard not to sound all fancy and mystical about this -- it's not magical stuff. It's just tricky to talk about kinds of abstractions that don't lend themselves well to being named. :)

Y_Y• 10 years ago

This is called linguistic determinism, or the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and is not widely accepted.

eukaryote2• 10 years ago

I was surprised in this article that "wine-dark" is still being bandied about as a translation for οἶνοψ πόντος. According to a scholar I spoke with many years ago, a more reasonable translation would be gleaming or shimmering. This would fit with another known use of οἶνοψ, referring to the back of an oxen in the sun.

twoodfin• 10 years ago

It's hard for me to believe that "gleaming" or "shimmering" would be an objectively better translation. Even putting aside that it's a beautiful turn of phrase, Homer's audience would have been conscious of the simile suggested by the word choice, no?

eukaryote2• 10 years ago

I do agree wine-dark is a beautiful turn of phrase, but from what I gather the literal translation is "wine-faced" or "wine-eyed".

Have considerable experience of being "wine-eyed", I can assure you my eyes are generally gleaming. :-)

DonaldFisk• 10 years ago

Liddell and Scott translates as wine-coloured or wine-dark, when used as an epithet of the sea, or wine-red or deep red, when used to describe oxen.

https://archive.org/stream/greekenglishlex00lidduoft#page/10...

smogcutter• 10 years ago

I recall "wine-dark" for oinodakruo, but it's been a while since school.

ysavir• 10 years ago

Yeah, I don't know why scholars approach ancient texts as though figurative writing was not available to them, and that their words can be taken at face value, without a need for understanding a variety of applicable contexts.

SilasX• 10 years ago

Well, they tried coordinating on some marker to indicate when a particular usage was non-figurative, but then, people started using that marker figuratively, as a generic intensifier, which broke the protocol...

Thaxll• 10 years ago

Red in French is "rouge" which is close enough :)

antarrah2• 10 years ago

Which doesn't necessarily mean the color red in French.

VeejayRampay2• 10 years ago

I'm French and I have no idea what you mean by that.

ardacinar• 10 years ago

french rouge and english red correspond to mostly the same shades of red, though. if you did a detailed study, you might find a slight difference but that's it.

glup• 10 years ago

It's funny that the author points to the possibility of a synthesis, when one was just published within the last month by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/40/11178.abstract.

shric• 10 years ago

To slightly throw a spanner in the works, the word for an egg yolk in Thai is "ไข่แดง" (kai daeng). ไข่ = egg, แดง = red. I've no idea why they use red here.

This isn't a color disagreement. The Thai word for red is otherwise identical to the red English speakers know of, and there are other words for the actual colors of yolks (i.e. yellow or orange) and Thai chickens don't produce red yolks :(

geomark• 10 years ago

I'm not so sure. Thais call things แดง that don't look red to me. The egg yolks you mentioned are one of them. Brown dogs are another. People with dark complexion are another (if really dark they call them เขียง = green).

himlion• 10 years ago

Blond hair is also often called red.

Latty• 10 years ago

It may well be that in the past, there was no separate word for yellow or orange, they were just considered shades of red. So people used 'red'. Then later, people felt enough need to create more nuanced terms.

In a similar way, if I remember correctly, Apple used to be the English word for all fruit[1]. We later added specific words for more fruits, and Apple only remains as the name of a single fruit - however, we still have 'Pineapples', which gained the name when apple was a generic fruit moniker.

Apparently it's common for blue and green to be clumped together - green (midori) is a surprisingly recent term in Japanese, so lots of green things are referred to as blue (aoi) because of traditional usage - including the green light on traffic lights, apparently.[2]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apple#Etymology [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

_ZeD_• 10 years ago

Well, in italian, conversely, the egg parts are "bianco" (white) and "rosso" (red).

mzs• 10 years ago

Polish has two reds - czerwony and rudy - I mean in the sense that even a young Polish child would use the different words for different colors that a young English speaking American child would call both simply red.

manwithaplan• 10 years ago

I think Hungarian has the same distinction with piros versus vörös: https://www.academia.edu/7375817/The_Hungarian_color_terms_p...

biztos• 10 years ago

Indeed, Piros and vörös are completely distinct, and nobody who speaks Hungarian would have any doubt what colors they indicate; and it's generally obvious when looking at a reddish color whether you're talking about piros (a brighter red, as in Red Riding Hood) or vörös (a darker red, as in Red Wine).

For English speakers, in everyday usage both are just "red." English has more specific words for red but we don't use them much.

This is a great example of why context-free machine translation is impossible. If you were to translate "red wine" as piros bor (instead of vörösbor) it would be ridiculous.

SonOfLilit• 10 years ago

Hebrew has "A-dom" for red, and "Bordo" (pronounced how a kid would misread a transliteration of Bordeaux, as in the red wines) for dark red.

We also have "Ka-chol" ("ch" pronounced like "phlegm" in "Achmad the Dead Terrorist") for blue and "Tche-let" for light blue, which are words you learn in kindergarten and use every day (you say "sky is Tche-let", never "sky is Ka-chol". When have you last heard someone describe a mid-day summer sky in English as anything but "blue"?)

Sure, we also have artist words for a thousand variations of blue: turquoise, aqua, aquamarine, etc'. In fact, just like in English, we use the French terms as is. But nobody learns them in kindergarten.

mr_pink• 10 years ago

Similarly, Russian has two blues: goluboy (like the sky) and siniy (like the sea). Nobody, not even a child, would confuse the two, or consider them the same color. Even blue eyes are differentiated into these two categories, just like English speakers differentiate between blue and green eyes.

monocasa2• 10 years ago

I see the Russian distinction between blues equivalent to the distinction between red and pink for English speakers.

tiglionabbit• 10 years ago

Hm. I'd like to see them translate the dialog in Undertale, particularly about Papyrus' "Blue" attack.

In English we have blue and cyan, but the word cyan is rarely used except to distinguish from blue.

chx• 10 years ago

There's a fascinating book on this topic, that is Guy Deutscher: Through the Language Glass.

int_19h7• 10 years ago

I'll second that. If anything in the article made you curious, absolutely get the book.

crummy• 10 years ago

Related, here's a visualization that shows connotations from different cultures for colours: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours...

Waterluvian• 10 years ago

Cool! Though I think a flat matrix would be far more readable. Can't really see if there are any trends on first glance.

jedberg8• 10 years ago

This title isn't a great title and the article doesn't explain the concept very well.

What this is trying to say is that human languages all over the world come up with color names in a similar path, but they stop at different points.

It's all very fascinating, and interestingly is the argument some use against strong AI -- that is they believe that to truly understand language you must have a human or human-like body that can perceive the world in the same way as a human, because these color words develop based on the physical properties of your eye and brain. For example, many people that are blind from birth have a hard time understanding the concept of color.

A few of you mentioned that Russian has two words for red. Russian is actually at the end of the spectrum (pun intended) -- that is they have the maximum number of color words.

English is close but we don't have separate words for blue and light blue.

You can see this as English speaking children learn words -- they will call "pink" "red" until they learn pink, and will almost always learn "red" before "pink".

Some cultures just stop with "warm" and "cold" (which are red orange yellow vs green blue purple).

Ah the joys of being a CogSci major -- we had entire weeks of classes devoted to this.

ryanx435• 10 years ago

English is close but we don't have separate words for blue and light blue.

Azure. Celeste. Cerulean. Cyan. Teal. Turqouise. aqua. Aquamarine. Lapis.

quicklyfrozen• 10 years ago

None of those are light blue :-)

jedberg8• 10 years ago

None of those are the same as the russian color, but more importantly, those aren't considered basic color terms[0]

Basic color terms need to be:

- monolexemic ("green", but not "light green" or "forest green"),

- high-frequency, and

- agreed upon by speakers of that language.[7]

All of those words you listed aren't high frequency.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms

xhedley• 10 years ago

Mandatory XKCD link here

https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

This isn't just a comic - Randall Munroe ran a color naming survey on internet users. Native language was not collected. I assume native English speakers were over-represented but not universal.

Interestingly there was a slight gender difference in naming among respondents (see the second table). Is that perceptual or a cultural gender-specific difference in how often men or women talk about color?

CWuestefeld3• 10 years ago

Some cultures just stop with "warm" and "cold"

This is where the article (and maybe the underlying studies?) seems to go off the rails:

asked him or her to name each one’s “basic color term”—the simplest, broadest word that described its shade

If I (a native English speaker) were asked in those terms to describe the coloration of an object, I think I'd conclude that I would need to limit my answers to "warm" and "cold". These are certainly color concepts in English, and indeed, as a photography enthusiast I work with them all the time when I edit my photos in Lightroom. So I can't see why they've then broadened the terms out to the more specific red, orange, etc., as more general terms are available.

The article seems to make an overture toward the possibility of thinking in colors even outside of the hue, saturation, and value model that westerners at least seem to think in - which could be very interesting. But the question above also seems to preclude such a discovery. As I read it, "shade" seems to be synonymous with "hue", thus demanding that I follow our familiar model. But if a different word were substituted for "shade", like the generic term "color", I think I would have answered that the most generic words available in English are "light" and "dark". (That, of course, is basically the V in HSV, and not a different model, but still provides another set of possible English terms of broader foundational breadth than "red", "orange", etc.

beejiu• 10 years ago

The article is extremely verbose. The diagram on page 1 of this document sums up the idea:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/medical-education/reprints/1997-Percept...

pavel_lishin• 10 years ago

As long as we're randomly talking about Russian colors, there's a color that I used to hear a fair amount in Russia that I don't know of an equivalent to here in the US: рыжый.

Maybe it's not a common color term there, either - the most context I've heard it in was describing a dachshund's hair color[1], and the second most common is describing a redhead's hair. Maybe the English equivalent is "ginger", but I always thought of ginger as being a much lighter color.

[1] http://www.allsmalldogbreeds.com/breeds/dachshund-smooth.jpg <-- an example. Это рыжая такса.

greenshackle2• 10 years ago

Auburn?

tetromino_3• 10 years ago

I think it's hard to find an exact equivalent because Russian has a number of color words that are used mostly for one category of objects. For example, рыжий for human or animal hair, русый for human hair, карий and болотный for eyes, смуглый for skin, etc. So when translating, you might pick the English equivalent for describing that type of object (рыжие волосы = red hair), but it doesn't feel quite right, because that same English word would be perfectly OK for describing the color of all sorts of unrelated things (and might imply a different shade when applied to those unrelated things!), and the original Russian word wouldn't be.

Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language (2015)

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