Himba color naming

[Chengjiang]

Anyone know of a good reference for the Himba people's color terminology? I ask because studies of the Himba are the main thing I've seen that seems to support the view that a language's color vocabulary influences people's ability to distinguish colors, rather than the apparent majority view that it does not.* However, all I've ever seen are brief descriptions of Himba color vocabulary aimed at laypeople.

Also, is anyone aware of other more unusual testable claims about modern languages' color vocabulary or their speakers' color perception?

*I lean more toward it not having much effect myself, but I'm curious about this case.

[linguoboy]

I'm not sure if you've already seen it, but Language Log covered the topic last year. Apparently the research isn't as robust as some sources have made it out to be: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18237.

[Chengjiang]

Ah, OK. Looks like this is another example of lay news jumping to conclusions (the Himba do not distinguish colors XYZ at all or have great difficulty distinguishing them) that were never even suggested by the original research (which showed some evidence for a slight delay in identifying distinct colors covered by the same term). Thanks.

[vec]

I mean, I think there's something to it though. Icelandic didn't gain a word for "orange" until the mid-century and my grandparents will typically call things that I would call appelsínugulur either gulur "yellow" or rauður "red". Carrots are called gulrætur "yellow roots" and egg yolks are eggjarauður "egg reds" (Icelandic yolks from free range chickens are much redder than what most people are used to now). Depending on where on the orange scale a thing typically falls, older Icelanders will tend to use either gulur or rauður. They certainly perceive orange, but to them referring to a thing as appelsínugult is often like calling something "cerulean", needlessly specific. Only generation-x and younger seem to consider appelsínugulur (literally: orange yellow) a basic color.

[gmalivuk]

I mean, I think there's something to it though. Icelandic didn't gain a word for "orange" until the mid-century and my grandparents will typically call things that I would call appelsínugulur either gulur "yellow" or rauður "red". Carrots are called gulrætur "yellow roots" and egg yolks are eggjarauður "egg reds" (Icelandic yolks from free range chickens are much redder than what most people are used to now). Depending on where on the orange scale a thing typically falls, older Icelanders will tend to use either gulur or rauður. They certainly perceive orange, but to them referring to a thing as appelsínugult is often like calling something "cerulean", needlessly specific. Only generation-x and younger seem to consider appelsínugulur (literally: orange yellow) a basic color.

But that means there's something to what, though?

Being uninterested in using a newfangled word for a color that's already got a serviceable name isn't the same as being unable (or less able) to *visually* distinguish among colors they don't have different names for.

[zompist]

Carrots are called gulrætur "yellow roots" [...]

How old is this word? Medieval carrots were not orange, but white, yellow, or purple.

[Chengjiang]

I mean, I think there's something to it though. Icelandic didn't gain a word for "orange" until the mid-century and my grandparents will typically call things that I would call appelsínugulur either gulur "yellow" or rauður "red". Carrots are called gulrætur "yellow roots" and egg yolks are eggjarauður "egg reds" (Icelandic yolks from free range chickens are much redder than what most people are used to now). Depending on where on the orange scale a thing typically falls, older Icelanders will tend to use either gulur or rauður. They certainly perceive orange, but to them referring to a thing as appelsínugult is often like calling something "cerulean", needlessly specific. Only generation-x and younger seem to consider appelsínugulur (literally: orange yellow) a basic color.

But that means there's something to what, though?

Being uninterested in using a newfangled word for a color that's already got a serviceable name isn't the same as being unable (or less able) to *visually* distinguish among colors they don't have different names for.

Yes. Unless older Icelanders have difficulty differentiating visually between hues your generation would call gulur and hues you'd call appelsínugulur, this doesn't have anything to do with the claims made about the Himba.

[vec]

I guess I misunderstood the point being made about the Himba. I think color words fall into categories of basic and special. Wheras an Icelander born around 1960 or later will consider appelsínugulur a basic color term, older people won't; for them it's a special color term, used only in cases where disambiguation is required. That was my point, which I didn't state well enough.

[Vijay]

Yeah, Malayalam doesn't have a word for "orange," either. Even for the fruit, we use the English word, which is ironic given that the word orange is itself ultimately of Dravidian origin. I'm not sure whether the Dravidian word it comes from meant 'orange', though (it doesn't seem to be native to South India in any case). For example, AFAIK, this is wrong because that word means neither 'orange' nor 'lemon' but rather 'lime'. The IPA is wrong, too; it's something more like [ˈn̪aːɾɛŋʲa] (and there's a phonemic distinction between dental and alveolar nasals in Malayalam, as well as between /ɾ/ and /r/).

[Nortaneous]

this thread is now about whether 'cyan' is a basic color term

[Zaarin]

this thread is now about whether 'cyan' is a basic color term

Considering I see "cyan" as blue and everyone else I know insists it's green, I argue that it should be...

[clawgrip]

Who are these everyone? It looks like a fluorescent light blue to me. From Wikipedia:

...it phenomenologically appears as a greenish vibrant hue of blue to most English speakers.

[Matrix]

Maybe these people are actually looking at a colour more like seafoam, think it's cyan, and thus call it a subset of green.

[Xephyr]

It doesn't look blue to me at all. It also doesn't look green either. For this reason I consider cyan to be a basic color term.

[mèþru]

I consider cyan to be a "bluish non-blue". Nobody that I know understands this position.

[zompist]

I think cyan is a pretty geeky term. As an experiment, I did some site-specific Google searches (at Target, Macy's, Sears) to see how often various terms were used.

red - 1,844,000 times
teal - 1,011,000
turquoise - 249,000
aquamarine - 226,000
cyan - 15,000

(And for some reason almost all of the cyan products were at Sears. Macy's had only 396 total.)

[mèþru]

I never encountered the word "cyan" outside of the study of colour/light and biology.

[Vijay]

Lol I don't think I remember really seeing "cyan" anywhere except on crayons! I never use that word.

[clawgrip]

I never encountered the word "cyan" outside of the study of colour/light and biology.

Same here.

[Chengjiang]

In my experience cyan is a technical term that I primarily encounter in optics, color theory/discussion of palettes, and sometimes in various scientific contexts. In lay speech I usually hear teal, turquoise, or one of the others mentioned.

That said, most often I just hear blue or light blue to refer to a cyan object. In my experience people tend to see cardinal cyan as a type of blue rather than a type of green. (This apparently includes many pre-modern users of the term, since it used to be common to say cyan-blue, and Isaac Newton, whose blue in "red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet" appears to refer to cyan with indigo referring more or less to RGB primary blue.) I myself tend to perceive cardinal cyan as more blue than green. The main exception seems to be darker shades of cyan, which for whatever reason look greener to me and which I think I've heard called sea green a number of times before.

I think an equivalent to cyan would be a basic color term in some languages with larger basic color vocabularies if it didn't tend to be perceived as a light blue. IIRC speakers of such languages tend to use the "light blue/azure" word to refer to it, e.g. Italian azzurro or Russian голубой.

-----

Here's an observation: Does anyone else think orange seems to typically be the last purely hue-based color term to appear? In other words, while orange is pretty indisputably less basic than green, it's also somewhat less basic than both purple/violet and orange's darker counterpart brown. For instance, brown was already well established in English long before orange was, as was purple (although the latter is admittedly both a loanword and, if memory serves, more recent than brown), and I don't think English is alone in this.

I personally find orange a less distinctive hue relative to red and yellow than purple is relative to red and blue. Is this true for anyone else? Admittedly, I don't find this terribly surprising, since orange covers a narrower range of hues (given a set of primaries that actually mix to something neutral, not RYB's dull brown) than purple does.

[Zaarin]

Who are these everyone? It looks like a fluorescent light blue to me.

It's nice to have some vindication, anyway. Anyone I've ever discussed the nature of cyan/turquoise/blue-green has tended to perceive them as green rather than blue. :/

[vokzhen]

Taking a loot at the Wikipedia page, subtractive primary/printing cyan is clearly blue, additive secondary/display cyan is more blue than green, but most of the other shades are green.

[clawgrip]

So basically actual cyan (cardinal cyan) looks blue, and if anyone says it looks green, they're probably thinking of a colour that is that is not pure cyan.

[zompist]

Taking a loot at the Wikipedia page, subtractive primary/printing cyan is clearly blue, additive secondary/display cyan is more blue than green, [...] .

Er, those are exactly the same color. You do realize that the diagram of 'printing cyan' is appearing on your monitor, where it is displayed using 'display cyan'?

[vokzhen]

Taking a loot at the Wikipedia page, subtractive primary/printing cyan is clearly blue, additive secondary/display cyan is more blue than green, [...] .

Er, those are exactly the same color. You do realize that the diagram of 'printing cyan' is appearing on your monitor, where it is displayed using 'display cyan'?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but then why do they have different hex codes and different places in sRBG, CMYK, and HSV color spaces?