It's still interesting because regardless if it's a different red, which it isn't, we know how rods and cones work and it is illogical to think those of the same species wouldn't experience a physical effect relatively similarly, with obvious exceptions in gene mutation. We experience the emotional and pyschological effects of colors in the same way, so even if they are different colors we interpret their effects the same, like red as passion. So it doesn't matter if we might see them differently, your comment doesn't have any bearing on this. And even if we did see color differently, does that mean this is just suddenly not interesting? Honestly, wouldn't that make this idea of color patterns emerging even more interesting and an even stranger phenomenon?
I feel like the whole "do we see the same colors question" is pretty dumb. We all have the mental capacity to distinguish separate colors, and that's all that matters. Asking what a particular color "looks like" in someone else's eyes is meaningless because their brain is receiving the same particular sensations from the same particular wavelengths of light. Our brain just needed a way to tell us red is red because it isn't blue, and it isn't yellow. Now obviously the theory of all our "color perceptions" being swapped randomly doesn't extend very far, as everyone is able to agree on which colors are complementary (opposite sides of the color wheel, i.e. red and green). Additionally, all of us are able to comprehend the "nearness" of certain colors, because everyone can agree that red is much "closer" to yellow than it is blue. Given those limitations, I suppose the only possible permutation between people's color perception would be if one saw colors inverted from another (the color wheel being flipped around an axis, replacing each color with its complement). Regardless, we all (mostly) feel the same sensations and make the same connections about each color. Of course there's some cultural essence to colors, how red is *associated* with love and that just gets imprinted in our minds over time. I don't think there's a lot of natural evolutionary connections between emotion and colors but apparently red is evolutionary linked to hostility and danger (therefore, anger). Anyway, point is: I think the question about whether "we see the same colors" as each other is just a sensational mind-boggler for people to ponder for a second and then move on with their lives.
I watched a study once where someone was exploring the idea that we dont refer to the sky as blue until we're told the sky is blue. He tested this on his 2 year old. Asking her every day what colour the sky was and never telling her what colour he thought it was. She said white until about 3 1/2.
In Kazakh "Green" and "Blue" used to have the same word "Kök". The word only meaning "Green", which is "Jasıl" became part of the language a lot later. This is why sometimes you see Juice boxes labelled as "Blue Apple", because some people are not used to the new word yet.
In Uzbek language, we don't actually have any words for "grey", "orange", and "brown". If one wants to describe an object of one of these colours in Uzbek they say "colour of ash", "colour of fire", and........ "colour of liver".
In Vietnamese, there’s no word for green. There’s blue, and then there’s “leaf-blue” to describe green. So my Vietnamese parents sometimes have a hard time differentiating between objects that are green vs blue because they’re the same word. I thought it was weird until I realized it’d be like me differentiating between indigo and blue/purple, which is a color I didn’t grow up learning.
Other comments said that in vietnamese green and blue have the same name, not that green just doesn't has one. And that you differentiate between leaf-color and sea-color.
Language doesn't prevent me from distinguishing reality like colors. I learned about how English doesn't have some words like in other languages. English even borrow some words like deja vu. But that doesn't prevent me from understanding those realities even if a word for it doesn't exist. I still can see more shades of colors even if a word in English doesn't exist for it. Like different shades of blue. It's like how someone was born deaf or some animals and never heard or learned language but still understands and sees basic realities like nature. You said so yourself and other comments here said that there is a differentiating word for blue and green in Vietnamese and that's "leaf" and "ocean". Perhaps it was more your parents were struggling to understand a different language.
I was always struggled with blue and green until I learned English. And I'm like "How convenient and easy it is". I realized that English is even easier to use in comparison with my mother language😂. Btw I wish our language just has "you" and "I" 🥲.
@@tonyyyfromcroatiaa681 True. For example, in my native language, Tagalog, there's only names for red (pula), orange (kahel), yellow (dilaw), green (berde/luntian), blue (asul/bughaw), white (puti), and black (itim). We use "color _" or "color of _" when referring to other colors. Specifically, we say "kulay abo" when referring to gray in general, but "kulay ng abo" for the specific color of ash. Also, we have two* "terms" for purple, "kulay ube" (deep/midium violet) and "kulay lilak" (liliac and lavender; light violet?), and for brown, "kayumanggi" (tan/brown skin tone, for skin specifically ["kulay kayumanggi" if you want to compare the color of one object to the color of skin]) and "kulay tsokolate/kape" (for foods and drinks respectively). *"Lila" or "Kulay Lila" is typically used as a translation for purple in general. Although I sometimes end up thinking of the Lilac color. So to separate the two, I use "Lila" for purple in general and "Lilak" for Lilac/Lavender, although that's not official. Although, we actually use the English terms "purple" and "violet" more often anyway.
At 1 year of age, my kids learned about which fruits they could eat from the garden. They had no problem distinguishing ripe red tomatoes and raspberries vs unripe yellow/green ones, but they had a very hard time accepting that there were ripe yellow varieties of tomatoes and raspberries. It took both of them until about 4-5 years of age to try a yellow tomato. They were convinced it was unripe, regardless of what I said. Being able to communicate red/purple, the color of many ripe fruits, vs yellow/green, the color of unripe fruit, is very important when a group must harvest their own food. Blue is all around us in sky and water, but the blueness isn't important to distinguish for daily existence. My kids really didn't care if the sky was blue or gray or white. They just cared about it being light (day) or dark (night). Also, whether water is good to drink is not dependent on its blueness. It's more about whether it's light/clear (good to drink) or dark/murky (bad to drink).
@@uvotminBut it doesn’t necessarily. As someone from the Seattle area, the sky is grey very often but you can tell the difference between our normal overcast days and days where it is actually rainy/stormy by the shade (light vs. dark) of grey, therefore I still think the distinction, while being more nuanced, is still not entirely necessary
In Bahasa Indonesia, we call the shades of a colour by age e.g. Pink it’s ‘Merah Muda’ which literally translates to ‘Young Red’ as well as the darker shades of red ‘Merah Tua’, ‘Old Red.’ It applies to blue, green and yellow too. In my own theory, it’s like the way fruits, vegetables and paddies age because of agricultural aspect of the earlier times of the country. Just my own opinion tho.
Fun Fact, a lot of Japanese colors are metaphorical in nature. Such as brown being 茶色 literally "tea color" the same goes for yellow 黄色(amber color), gray 灰色 (ash color), and formerly blue which shared a word with green for a while. Orange and pink more recently were brought along with English.
It has to be pointed out that the Japanese language has a deep origin from Mandarin and grow out the Chinese culture itself afterwards. In this case, 茶色 is a term from Japanese language itself. But 青色, the color in the middle of blue and green, is from ancient Chinese. Mixing the two together is simply because of the dye then didn’t have pure light blue or green.
Actually, orange and pink have another names that don't come from English: pink is also called 桃色 ("peach color"), and orange is 橙色 ("sour orange color"). Japanese has actually many native words for things, but tend to drop some in favor of English... Which for me, as a native Spanish speaker, it's actually sad.
@@azarishiba2559 it's done in effort for Japan to be considered "European" and more westernized since Meji revolution. Also the nature of Japanese allows it to technically borrow any words from other languages and represent them in kaja in hope to look "cool" or "modern" while representing the same concept in kanji or Chinese vocabularies is considered "old." Personally, as a Chinese, I find this trend quite funny
Is it true that japanese call the green at the traffic light as "ao" which is the word for Blue? I also understood that jaoanese use "midori " for green, but in other contexts
@@dastanjan320 They use 青 to refer to green traffic lights, apples, and several other things. The reason is that using ao can also mean a bright vibrant green.
In Turkish we dont have an actual name for brown, we call it "the color of coffee" which is *kahverengi* kahverengi=kahve+renk+i *Kahve* is *coffee* , *renk* is *color* and *i* is a suffix meaning *of*
Lol i was just thinking why doesn’t my language have anything interesting while all of those people in the comments mention something from their language Than i saw your comment and i was like “oh sure, there’s that”
@Maggie Caron primary colors rely on color theory and depend on what color space you're using. in paints, red yellow and blue were historically the most readily available pigments. when talking about primary colors in relation to paint it refers to the color theory that uses these pigments. inking is a different craft and uses a subtractive color space that's a bit different from paint. since you can't really ink on black, it instead subtracts from white. where white is rgb magenta is rb (-g) yellow is rg (-b) cyan is gb (-r) so to make blue you'd mix magenta and cyan (-g and -r) with this blue, you wouldn't be able to make green by adding yellow, since that would mean -b. you'd end up with black. it's a different medium from paint with different rules. there are also the primary colors in light, which is an additive color space. in light there is rgb, and magenta yellow and cyan are secondary colors, because you start from black. adding these primaries together creates white. just some color theory 101. i recommend reading more about this since it's very interesting :)
Even in English, many color names, even some “basic” ones, got their names from things. The _color_ orange is named after the _fruit_ orange, or rather, the fruit of the orange tree (what it was originally called). Until the English found out about oranges, they referred to that color as “reddish yellow.” Purple comes from the purpura mussels whose shells are deep purple or navy blue, and were the source for dyes of that color range (a very expensive source of dye in ancient times, which is why it was a sign of royalty or great wealth to wear purple). Those dyes range in color from what we today would call “plum” to what we today would call “navy blue,” and would include “violet.”
In Swedish we used to call the colour orange "brandgul" - "fire yellow" when I was a kid in the 1970s. Now everyone calls it orange, although the fruit is called "apelsin" - "apple from China".
I've always wondered why Purpur means purple (I've never heard it though, I've only heard Lila or Violett) in German, I always wondered how they got Purpur and English got purple
The fact that orange as a colour was a late addition to the English language can be seen in names like "robin redbreast", a bird with a clearly orange breast.
In Persian language: Blue = "Abi", translates to "watery" Brown = "Ghahvei", translates to "from coffee" Purple = "Banafsh", translates to "viola flower" (a purple colored flower called "banafsheh") Yellow = "Zard", translates to "from gold" (Zar = gold) Green = "Sabz", translates similar to the word "vegetable-y" (Sabzi = vegetable) Orange = "Naranji", translates to another citrus similar to "orange fruit" but with a more sour taste. Pink = "Soorati", translates to "face colored" Gray = "Khakestari", translates to "Ash colored" I just realized they are all comparison words other than the words for black, white, and red.
Pouya Shooliz In English, there are just orange and violet for comparison color words. We refer to vegetables as greens sometimes too, but it seems more likely that the color name existed first and started being used as a more informal term for vegetables. Here’s something interesting: first, as you may already know, English has many different sources. We can use the word soil (from Latin) and dirt (from Norse) interchangeably. In terms of colors, they all have Germanic roots except for orange (derived from your word in Persian!) and purple (derived from Greek). Purple and violet are usually seen as interchangeable in English too. So the two words that are not Germanic just happen to also be comparison words. But even some of the Germanic words are comparisons, for example white comes from weiss which also means wheat. English speakers just don’t know that it’s a representational word because white and wheat are spelled/pronounced differently. Obviously they are close, but so are green and grin and those meanings have nothing in common. So it’s not intuitive that white comes from wheat. And also, the color of wheat falls into the yellow category. According to the video, it sounds like in earlier times it would have just been grouped with the other “light” colors.
Hi! English speaker trying to learn Farsi over here. :) I found some other color names and I'm curious about them. I read that قرمز (crimson/red) is also the name for the Kermes insect (from which red dye is obtained), but I assume they came up with the name of the color before the name of the insect. سرخ apparently also means scarlet? Then there's ارغوانی which is described as "colour of the blossom of Cercis siliquastrum (Judas tree), amethyst, mauve, purple" Also زرشکی (wiktionary says it means "purple") comes from zereshk, a plant which in English is called barberry. So what's the difference between zereshki, arğavâni and banafsh?
Nein The video is referring to how everyday objects are used to name the color itself, not how a color is used to describe objects/people. Persian is an ancient language that was formed 5000 to 10000 years ago where the everyday people of that society were probably light brown skin. I don’t think they came into contact with an African person until much later when they formed an empire about 2500 years ago. I don’t know how they referred to a black person but given that the concept of “race” didn’t exist back then, and that Persians themselves range in color from light brown to very dark brown, they probably would have just though of blacks as regular people of another clan or tribe. In modern Persian language however, your question has a boring answer: a black person is referred to as “black person”.
In Russian, "purpurnyy" can be a shade of red, purple and similar to magenta. I think the word "fioletovyy" is used more often, and it corresponds more to the shade in the video. The most accurate definitions are "sirenevyy" or "lilovyy" (lilac), which describe colors through the coloring of flowers.
Lilovyy. One of our kittens is called Lilac in English but that side of the family speaks English, Dutch, and Russian. The Russian is a very pretty name.
My classmates were once discussing which color was marsala actually, then I just sent them the color in hex definition and won the discussion. But then I was kicked out
In Vietnamese, we call green and blue both "xanh". When we need to distinguish, we call blue as "xanh nước biển" ("xanh" of the ocean) and green as "xanh lá" ("xanh" of the leaf)
I have just realised that Russian and English speakers use different set of colours do describe the rainbow, though the total number of colours is still 7 for each: Russians use their unique "goluboy" (pigeon blue) color, but do not use the pink colour. Also as a Russian I never thought of pink as a separate colour, more like a lighter version of purple. It feels kinda odd because I cannot even pick the pink colour out of rainbow spectrum.
Что за бред. Загугли «цвета радуги» на английском и на русском. Разница совсем в другом. Мы не используем цвет «индиго» в качестве отдельного цвета в обычной речи. Только для уточнения (точно так же с пурпурным, каштановым и пр.). Для нас это тёмный “фиолетовый”, находящийся близко к «синему». В свою очередь «розовый» и “pink” это один и тот же цвет. Точно так же “violet” и «фиолетовый» это одно и то же. Розовый цвет сильно отличается в русской речи от фиолетового цвета, как в английском “violet” отличается от “pink”. В русской речи «голубой» и «синий» имеют такую же связь - один светлее другого. Автор видео явно не знает о такой штуке как «лингвистика». Заявлять что в русском языке только 12 обозначений цветов очевидно бессмысленно. Куда бирюзовый делся? Где фиолетовый? Зато пурпурный вставил.
@@Артем-ь6е9л он говорит про 00:53. Там указан розовый, но нет голубого. У англичан и голубой, и синий - это blue. А в русском есть дополнительно голубой. И что-то непонятное вы про purple/violet написали. Они оба фиолетовые, просто один в тёплых оттенках, другой в холодных. В видео речь об ОСНОВНЫХ цветах, а не о радуге. Бирюзовый мы вполне можем назвать сине-зеленый, а как ты назовешь синий, используя названия других цветов? При этом мы выделяем отдельно дополнительно голубой и розовый, когда англичане и голубой, и синий называют одним словом.
А я вижу розовый. По крайней мере на спектре в видео. Огромное пространство между красным и фиолетовым 😄 Просто радуга начинается на красном и заканчивается фиолетовым - они на краях спектра - и переход чисто физически отсутствует. Но если спетр радуги зациклить в круг или сдвинуть - вы розовый прекрасно увидите. И здесь речь не про радугу, а про палитру цветов )
it’s really interesting because pink is just a weird color category in general. most “pink” colors are really just light red, but there is of course magenta, which is an actual point on the color spectrum, but not as commonly referred to as simply “pink”, so it makes sense why it’s difficult to pinpoint since it’s sort of an awkward label culturally.
@@dhskshdksh I'm a designer so watching this was quite intriguing to me, as people all around the globe categorize "basic" colors that are actually not... Colors (hues) but tones (light/dark, brightness values). I understand people that don't study this are not obligated to know this fact, but it's almost funny to see how humans are confusing in different ways just to be the same in the end (the clusters the video talked about)...
In my language, yellow and green are seen as two different shades of a single colour which is similar to the colour of a ripe leaf. We call green as leaf colour and yellow as turmeric colour.
That makes sense to me. When I was little we would play “Slug bug” in the car and our points of contention were usually about whether a car was more yellow or greenish. My sister would call “slug bug yellow” and I would call “slug bug green” and she’d say “where?” and when I’d point to it she’d say “I already called that one. Slug bug yellow”. I’d say “But it’s not yellow, it’s a yellowish green.” Fun times.
I mean, this video is very vague, there are so much more to it, for instance the evolution of language is important, in English green and yellow are separated, but this distinction developed pretty recently, in proto-indo european there was only one word for both colours and in different language the distinction occured in different times or sometime it didn't at all. In many cases the word for yellow and the word for green came from the same old word that was used to describe both this colours by our ancestors thousands years ago. It's not suprising that some tribes have less colours in their languages, with development of society the numbers of important colours and distinctions between them increase. Sometimes in different way in different places.
I've always wondered why I can't express our "goluboy" color in English and why I have to call it "blue" when it's not blue. And now I've finally realized... P.S. I’m getting dozens of responses so I’d like to clarify one point: it’s not about translation, actually. Indeed, “goluboy” may be called light blue/sky blue/cyan/turquoise/azure, etc. But the key point is that in Russian, we would never say that the sky is blue, because it’s not. It’s about the worldview or something. That’s why, when speaking English, we basically have to replace one colour with another to verbalize the idea of clear skies.
Also in Russian, the words "kofeynyy" (coffee), "kirpichnyy" (brick) can be used for shades of brown, for green shades -- salatovyy, travyanoy (herbal), izumrudnyy (emerald). Sometimes colors are associated with substances like honey, sand, milk.
Yeah, I love it, you see the color and you can describe it with something that contains this color. Bolotnyy color is yellow or green? Probably somewhere in the middle
I'm wondering if the reason red is so dominant in our mind is related to it being a sign of danger (poisonous animals usually have red or orange tones, fire is red-esque , etc)
While blue and green, while being widely present in the environment (plants, sea, sky) are more of a background kind of color which our mind kind of ignores.
The reason for that is, that red is Literally stronger than any other visible color. It has the longest wavelength in the visible spectrum and thus, catches our attention the most and the wavelength gets progressively shorter as you continue through the spectrum.That's why colors with shorter wavelengths seem softer or like background colors.
Khachig Ainteblian I don't believe this is true, do you know it for a fact? longer wavelength mean less energetic, not more so. Also it's worth pointing out that our brain doesn't perceive information like that. our ears don't notice lower pitches best because they have longer wavelength, even though they are more powerful. Our brain focus on the middle range, to better notice human speech.
Khachig Ainteblian Yellow-green is actually the most visible color that the human eye is sensitive to. The human eye is most sensitive to 555nm which we perceive as yellow-green (the color yellow and green is usually where peak sensitivity is at). Have you ever seen construction workers wearing fluorescent yellow-green vests? Highlighters?? Even tennis balls!! School busses and yellow fire hydrants are also a prime example of the color yellow being more noticeable to the human eye.
claire chen 陳嘉蓮 That makes more sense :) I wonder why yellow? is it a physical property of our eyes or some kind of processing by our brain? perhaps it's related to the color of the sun and natural light here on earth
I once asked a Xhosa lady to teach me some words and colours were part of it. She knew only two or three colours in her language but knew the colours in English. My husband was an electrical technician in the airforce many moons ago. He once trained a Sotho guy and realised the man only knew the basic colours. They had to send him on a colour course so he could actually learn his trade. Now it makes so much sense to me.
Here’s a kinda-fun-fact of colors in Vietnam that you probably don’t care 🤷♂️: In Vietnamese, blue and green have the same name, which is “xanh”, BUT, if you add another word after it, it will be different, so, blue in Vietnamese is “xanh DƯƠNG” or “xanh BIỂN” (that word means ocean/beach) and green in Vietnamese í “xanh LÁ” or “xanh LỤC” (i’m not actually quite sure with the second word but the first word means leaf). So that’s how you call the two colors in Vietnamese :)
Xanh, from Thanh, both of which are from 青 in Chinese/Hantu. 青 in Chinese have also originally meant to mean all shades of green, blue and black, but eventually Chinese would evolve words like 綠，藍 and 黑 to describe green, blue and black respectively, which is Luc, Lam and Hac in Vietnamese. Xanh duong is 青洋 (blue ocean), Xanh bien is 青𣷭 (blue sea). Xanh la is 青蘿 (green leaf/plant), Xanh luc is 青綠 (lit. green green).
William Genitempo I have a question, you know how some stuff people say they taste "green" (idk how to formulate my question so I hope you get where I am trying to go)
@William, same here mate! @green alien, those glasses are more a way of tricking the eyes and brain. They can't actually rectify the internal problem which is due to the shape of the cones in one's eyes.
0:18 Basic color categories 1:40 Color “hierarchy” 3:46 Color-object comparison 4:02 Hanuno’o color spectrum 4:28 Berlin and Kay universal map of color
An infant sees black, white and red initially. Red stands out because of the color of blood - danger. As the cones in the retina of the eyes and the brain synapses develop and process better, then distinct differences in color become apparent when colors of food (fruits, vegetables, meats, grains, nuts, etc.) and associated experiences with those colors are learned. That's why a baby - remembering a sweet purple grape flavored lollipop - may inadvertently place a purple piece of cloth in its mouth. The cones of the retina can distinguish certain frequencies of color. Experience with those frequencies of colors that we process helps us to distinguish between those colors. I remember a study that said seeing the color Pepto-Bismol Pink will help reduce an emotional person's rage (ie: road rage). The reason: Pink is a healthy skin tone color - no red there - so the brains' association of pink goes with calm (no danger). FYI: This info is all conjecture on my part. Just wanted to share what I thought.
@@nabagaca I think it would be better the other way around - the AI showing that red is more distinctive is a theory as to why we could see it first. After all, babies aren't naming colours
Yeah, if almost nothing was blue except for the sky you dont have to give that color a name since it's tied to the sky (which everyone would know) and anything with the same color would probably be 'skycolor' or you point up and say "this color".
yeah, but when you only have the sky as a blue thing, you just have your word for "sky" and that's what you use. you don't need a color-word for it. and if you had the ocean or a river that was often blue, it was still only two things, so it made more sense to name those specific things than the color they are. you only need more words for colors when you need to describe things to others, and you wouldn't really have to describe the sky to anyone. and if you wanted to describe a body of water, then you'd focus more on its shape and possibly content (fish, mud, stones, plants, whatever else) than on what water looks like, because most people would already know what water looks like. so one specific word for that color would just seem unnecessary.
The sky is always changing colour (depending on the time of day/night & weather, amongst other things) & as such is useless as an archetype for any colour...
my mother language isn't english and I've noticed that people use the word blue to describe both a lighter or a darker shade of the same color. In my language we say the word azul (blue) and celeste (light blue). I didn't know there wasn't a different word for those colors so I used to get so mad at people, I was like aRE YOU BLIND OR WHAT
Azul marino (navy blue) as well. But then again, In Spanish there are usually a few different ways of saying something. In my country the color "orange" can also be "mamey" which is also a fruit ^_^
in french, and france, especially in elementary school, i learned to distinctively call dark blue : bleu marine, light blue : bleu ciel, and blue (as in middle blue) : bleu, but i think as i mentioned before, it is the same in english, dark blue, light blue, cyan, blue, indigo... etc, its just shades and tones
I am from Cote d'Ivoire, the country mentioned at the beginning of the video and i'm very impressed how deep your research have been. You got one more subscriber!
@@гей_порно Purpurnyy is closer to red on a spectrum. Fioletovyy is in the middle between blue and red. I think, in this video, fioletovyy is more accurate. Or it could be sirenevi.
@@artemmentiy7107 пурпурный и фиолетовый - официальные переводы слова purple, вот только среди основных цветов спектра есть фиолетовый, но нет пурпурного, спроси у радуги
I remember learning in my linguistic class in college that some Native American/Alaskan tribes had multiple words for blue to explain the ocean, ice, rivers, ponds, etc. It's been so long ago I can't remember
Works both ways. Evolution is not a "because" thing. You cannot prove a direction because there isn't any. It IS widely perceived because animals that used it as warning and those who perceived the warning "agreed" that it works. The ability to create red is what made it a useable pigment. 3 perceivable colors (cones on retina). Green would not work, becasuse of chlorophyl. Blue would not work because of light scattering in atmospshere, and reflecting in water (etc). Red got used because the others would not work.
I did my graduation paper about the history of the Kuna natives in the border between Panamá and Colombia and thought it was intriguing they didn't have a name for "green" or "blue" in their language. To them, the color of leaves and the sky was just a background dark or light color by default 🌳🌬🌿
On another topic, if the amount of dedicated color words a language has is an indicator of how "civilized" that culture is, wouldn't that mean Russians are objectively superior to us Angloes?
Btw, since Russians think of what I'll call "cyan" (which 0:26 says you guys call "siniy", but someone else in these comments said that siniy and goluboy are actually reversed in that chart) as being an independent color rather than a special kind of blue, then what colors are the sky and water in Russian?
In Telugu, the word "paccha rangu" is used to describe both yellow and green. However, to specify the color green, the term "aaku paccha" is used, where "aaku" translates to "leaf," highlighting the leaf-green shade associated with the color.
The fascinating thing about this is that even before humans, you can find signs of colour hierarchy. For instance, the bacteria in the "The sun is a deadly lazer" times of Earth could detect different "colours" with primitive light-sensitive chemicals. The bacteria also knew only two colours: Light, which meant danger, and dark, which meant safety.
“To the natives, Greenblue is a pure color, primordial almost, undifferentiated by a nature that refuses to divide them. The Aztecs referred to the sea as ‘Celestial Water’ because they pondered that the ‘Green Sea’ melted with the ‘Blue Sky’ across a channel in the horizon.” (Eulalio Ferrer Rodríguez, 2000)
Fundamental words to describe colours in Hindi, my native language. 1. Kaala/Shyam - Black 2. Safed/Shwet - White 3. Laal - Red 4. Hara - Green 5. Peela - Yellow 6. Neela - Blue 7. Bhoora - Brown 8. Bhagva - Ochre Colours derived from other objects (but are colours of significance in India). 8. Gulabi - Pink (trans. like rose) 9. Narangi - Orange (trans. like orange fruit) 10. Baingani - Purple (trans. like eggplant) 11. Dhusar/Saleti - Grey (trans. like dust/slate) 12. Jaamuni - Violet (trans. like Indian blackberry) 13. Firoza - Turquoise (trans. like turquoise stone) 14. Khaki - Light tan (trans. like soil) 15. Katthai - Maroonish brown (trans. like Indian acacia)
I'm Bulgarian and in our language It works in the same way - ''kafyavo'' (lit. ''coffee-like''). Albanian seems to do It too. It's the Balkan sprachbund in action.
i did not even know that about the colours in the philippines! but now that i’m breaking it down,, it makes sense. we have our own words for red (pula) and black (itim, also meaning dark) but our words for blue (asul) and pink (rosas) come from spanish words.
青 means both “blue” and “green” in Japanese. In the olden days it was used interchangeably, but nowadays 青 tends to mean blue and 緑 green. However they still describe stop lights today as 青 rather than 緑
Because ao or blue has less syllables then midori or green. So it’s kind of a short cut. You ask any person what color is this with a picture of green they will say midori and never ever say ao. If you show them blue and ask what color it is they will always say ao. It’s a shortcut.
NHK TV in Japan in the :Choko-san in Shikareta" program broadcast last week explained WHY 青 means both “blue” and “green” in Japanese in traffic lights. This comes from a single newspaper article describing the first stop light in Japan, located in Hibiya, central Tokyo. The newspaper article stated that the color was 青 (blue). In those days the photos were all black-white, so nobody knew the difference, and the general public repeated what they were told, that traffic lights included the color blue. Somehow this has continued to this day, even though everyone knows that the color is green. You see similar cultural attributes for the color of the sun, which some cultures describe as "red" (Japan and Russia, for example), some describe as "yellow" (US and England, for example), and many describe as "white". Human eyes are adapted for sunlight, so the light of the sun a noon naturally is seen as "white", but the official color changes according to culture.
I don't get it, what's the point of naming two different colors the same? Confusing people or what? The sky and the grass doesn't have the same color, therefore the sky and the grass shouldn't be named as 青 when referring to the color.
@vox could also include some notes on the neuroscience of perception. The way eyes/brains digest colour may rely on the following (in order of simplicity): 1. Contrast (thus, black/white) 2. Color processing pathways: the color-perceiving cone cells are attuned to light/dark, red/green, blue/yellow; perhaps why these contrasts develop in language first. 3. Hue/Luminosity/Saturation interactions (due to the structure of the light spectrum and our visuo-neural pathways, 'red' appears bright, very saturated and NOT washed out. Green/yellow are bright but are so close to white that they can appear less saturated and therefore seem to have less contrast. Blue/purple are the darkest colors, and closest to black.) 4. Salience (red is blood/dirt - red is also poison/food/fire: all things dangerous or important for survival and, importantly, typically rare! Green/yellow are found plentifully in the environment and often don't connote danger, thus don't command attention as much. Blue/purple are rare naturally except in the sky - and a blue sky rarely signifies much regarding immediate danger/reward. Purples are extremely rare anywhere.) 5. Cultural Amplification of the Above
I love how the "Blue wasn't common before manufacturing" line has incited many comments. But all of them reference the sky and sea (which is ironically colorless). I think this unintentionally proves his point seeing we can only come up with two things.
@@IsomerMashups Yes, and things that are everywhere, like oxygen, fade into the background. For a color to be deserving of a name, it needs to manifest itself in as many *distinct* objects it can.
@@leonardodavinci4259 what? Except when you look up you can see the blue of what we call sky and you can't see oxygen. Oxygen doesn't fade into the background because it's everywhere, it fades into the background because you can't detect it with your eyes.
Did you know that in Vietnam, "màu xanh" both means blue and green. They are diffrenciated by adding "dương" for blue and "lá cây"/"lá" (which means leaf) for green. So: màu xanh dương is blue and màu xanh lá is green
Similarly, in the Middle Ages, we didn't have individual names for all colours like we do today. Colours tended to be named after their shades. So purple, would have been called blue, orange would have been called red etc. This is the reason we call people with orange hair redheads.
pyropulse, interestingly, I think for the Romans and Babylonians the word "purple" was a word that referred to the dye or animal, not to the color exclusively, which would make it not pass the movie's definition. just guessing
pyropulse Chill. The whole point of the video is this is that as a language/culture grows and evolves it gains more color terms. The Romans were ahead of that English base language, whatever it’s called
Just because a term exists, doesn't mean it's going to be commonly used in the vernacular. I mean, you don't USUALLY call things maroon, or cinnabar, do you?
Many plains indian tribes had hundreds of words for horses. A tall, old, skinny, bay horse may have a name of its own. While a 2 year old, grey, stallion with a black tail and white mane could have its own name. Inuits:snow::Native plains tribes:horses.
@@FlushGorgon just look it up if you dont believe it. And I didn't say they've had hundreds of horse words for thousands of years, I'm well aware that Europeans brought the horses. I remember trying to learn Caddo and thinking they have entirely too many names for horses. Btw, horses were in America before people ever crossed the land bridge and hunted them out. Same thing with camels (which had their origins in America, and migrated out to Asia)
This is very interesting to me as an artist. This also makes sense why Red-Black is more common and feels more natural than say Yellow-Black or Blue-Black. This can actually be a more accurate way to understand color harmony and how we perceive each color.
they were for the ancient egyptains, more specifically... red and black. Referring to the silt type, black silt being near the nile delta creating the best farmland and red being the desert that protects them from both sides.
Maybe the blue of the sky is just seen as a neutral background, therefore needing no description. Living, as I do, in New England, I see the ocean as “dark.”
In ancient Chinese, those are described to be either white (苍, azure) or green (青, teal/cyan). In fact, anything from almost yellow-ish green (newborn grass), to pure blue (navy blue I guess, also the color of a plant-based blue dye) is considered "green". Maybe there just isn't a need to separate them apart.
nope, 青 in ancient Chinese means blue here, in Japanese and Chinese, green and blue were the same (青), till modern days Chinese use a new word for green, and Japanese use another word for blue.
3:44 CORRECTION: The Indonesian language is called "Bahasa Indonesia" in Indonesian and "Indonesian" in English. The word "bahasa" simply means "language".
I've just realized that russian "rozovyy" comes from "rose", so it's quite comparative. However, we don't use it as "the color of rose", it's just a fun-fact from etymology.
Here are some colors in Japanese. yellow kiiro(or yellow) blue ao(or blue) indigo-blue aiiro purple murasaki(or purple) pink pinku(or momoiro) red aka(or reddo) orange orange(or daidai) brown brown(or brown) black kuro(or blacku) gray haiiro(or grey) white shiro(or white) The vocabularies in our language are becoming more and more English. More and more languages are imported and vocabularies are replaced in Japanese. What we used to call "Keitai-denwa" are now "Smartphone（スマートフォン）". We don't have a original Japanese word for "card" So we just say card(カード) . We don't say "zubon" anymore. We say "pants". There are even words that were changed like paso-com(short for personal computer)and it's on the dictionary. "I bought pants at the department store with my credit card" will be like "デパートメントストアでパンツをクレジットカードで買った" "department store de pants wo credit card de katta" in english this will be like "department store at pants the credit card with bought" (yes everything is backwards) Pronunciations are different from that of in english, but I feel like we are abandoning our language. Maybe it's our nature to do so. We have 2 alphabets (and a bunch of Chinese characters) and one of it, which is called Katakana, is used to make a foreign word into Japanese. For example: Eng：pants→JP：パンツ(pronounsed pantsu) Why did I even write this here. Maybe I'm just tired. So longaybowser!
This increased integration of English words into the Japanese lexicon has actually made it harder on me, as someone learning Japanese, because I actually sometimes find it more difficult to read English words in Katakana (and determine where one word begins and ends) than to just read the actual Japanese word for it. Idk, that's just a weird quirk of mine.
I'm a Chinese, and I think it is a shame that Japanese are stop using Kanji or Japanese words making new words (for example, 携帯電話), they just adopt English pronounciation(Katakana)
isn’t hiragana, katakana and kanji? i’ve tried learning japanese but with the “old family” speaking the 1980’s dialect and my parents/younger family knowing the 1990’s alterations, is HARD!! my dad knows kanji and i’ve given up on trying that, even tho i want to learn it because is so beautiful! katakana is like my crutch and even then, i know 0.001% )-: thanks for this whole big comment!
Tate; First came dark gray, then light gray. Then gray blood, gray dirt and, then gray wheat, until at the end we come to the frilly gray of princess dresses. Easy.
Blue is the rarest pigment in nature. (Even when you look at the sky(thats not a pigment)) There is only one butterfly that has a blue pigment. The other "blue" butterflys have microscopic structures on their scales that actually refract light in a way so that only blue light comes back out. Blue can be harvested from only two places i know of. Yes there are blue flowers but ive never seen them wild before. Myssels, and some plant native to california. Green is the most abundant color in nature (plants). With red being the second most abundant(blood). Brown after that because of tree trunks, dirt, "waste". Hope youve learned something interesting from this. Have a good day whoever reads this!
There are definitely a lot of different blue flowers! Forget-me-nots are objectively blue, and there are some anemones (of the flower kind) that are blue or indigo (which I would call dark blue or violet depending on hue honestly, but I admit to realising you may think differently). At least one more that I can see in our backyard as a wild flower comes to mind that's indigo-ish, but I don't know what it's called. And that's just the natural ones that are common right where I live!
If the sky during day is blue, it is abundant. Who cares if it is a pigment or not? So a random person looking at the horizon during the day would see blue, green and brown. How can you say something is not abundant if it accounts for half of the horizon of a person? And at night he would see mostly black. The only explanation I can come of is that ancients called blue "light", and black "dark". For whatever reason green and red was not considered light, but a color of its own.
In my native language, Vietnamese, we consider blue and green to be shades of the same color. To distinguish between the two, you have to qualify it by saying "sea color" or "plant color". On a random note, we have two words with crabs. It's interesting to see where a language and people's priorities lie.
Sonoma Calling! We also have plenty weird ways to describe yellow so yeah, and the word father in some of out dialects is the word bug in others so yeah language is weird.
Yang It doesn't work like that. To us those are 2 different colors, we just use the same word for it. So to distinguish we add objects in front, like plant, sea, sky, etc
Great video ! Indeed it's interesting to see that in French, the color names switch to comparisons to material things after the six main colors (+ grey/"gris") : brown : "marron" = some kind of chesnut with a deep brown shell pink : "rose" = like the flower burgundy : "bordeaux" = like the wine from the city of Bordeaux purple : "violet" = like the viola flower (violette in French) orange : "orange" = like the fruit and so on
Some thoughts (warning: this is long, but personally I think it's worth it to read it): 1. Most people separate their laundry into darks, lights, and reds. And I know that's mainly so the colors don't bleed too much but hey who's to say we couldn't separate our laundry into blue-ish colors, yellow-ish colors, and reddish colors? But we still do darks, lights, and reds. So I wonder if the black, white, red thing mentioned in the video has developed in other societies in ways like that. 2. I've heard of some tribal language in Africa where they don't have specific words for numbers. They only have words for a lot, a little, more than, less than, and so on. So that kinda reminded me of this, and I wonder if there's any sort of language pattern for numbers and stuff like that across world languages. 3. When it was talking about the language that only had a few specific color words but had other words that coresponded to common objects that had that color, it reminded me of color words in Japanese; basically way way back in the day, the Japanese didn't have words for gray, pink, or orange. (The majority of the lastly-developed colors in societies as mentioned in the video.) If they wanted to describe something that was gray, they said ねずみ色 (pronounced nezumi iro, which translates to "mouse color") and if they wanted to describe something pink they would say 桃色 (pronounced momo iro and translating to "peach color"). Also correct me if you know more about this but for orange (I knew the ones for gray and pink already but I had to look up the old word for orange so correct me if I'm wrong) they said 橙色 (daidai iro) which actually translates somewhat to "orange color". However, nowadays, they usually say グレイ、ピンク、and オレンジ or オレンジ色, which are pronounced "gurei", "pinku", and "orenji" or "orenji iro", which are all pronounced like the English words for those colors, so I guess they developed more as their language was influenced by other cultures. 4. Lastly, I am grapheme synesthetic, meaning I relate things like numbers and letters to colors. Synesthesia is very rare but I was wondering if people who live in a region or speak a language where less focus is put on varying types of colors have less of a chance of having color-linked synesthesia of any sort, or if there is any link like that. I mean as far as I know, if you have synesthesia, you're just born with it, but maybe people who have the grapheme form and speak languages where there are fewer color groupings don't realize that they have it, because they don't think about separating colors into such specific groups and applying them to such big groups like letters or numbers. (By the way I'm not trying to say that would make them stupid or anything; it's just a random neuroscience-y question.) If you survived this far through my nerd freak-out session, congratulations, you get a gold star. Thank you and good day. And please reply with any other thoughts!! ~:~
what i find really funny is that we are shook that they call blue sky cause that's its color but fail to notice that orange is called orange because that's the color of the fruit,,,,,
nihilistic trash Ha ha yeah, but maybe that begs the question of "Which came first, orange the color or orange the fruit?" I mean I don't know, most likely they would have said something along the lines of, "This fruit is called an orange and we don't have any other word for the color of this fruit so we're just gonna call that color orange," but hey maybe they were like, "Okay this is the color orange and we don't have a name for this fruit but it's the same color as the color we call orange so why don't we call it an orange?" I mean who's idea was it to call a fly a fly? These are the questions, people... Anyway I'm just overanalyzing stuff for fun. Thanks for your comment. :) ~:~
That was an interesting read, and after this video it really does make you realize how much of the categories we've made and accustomed ourselves to really is just a big spectrum. And circumstance just has it that we divided it in certain ways depending on our environment and biology etc. Like number systems being based on the number of fingers we have, to how we divide colors. It can be so hard to break out of these categories that we've made, it seems absurd and just not normal to not have a word for blue or having a 12 based number system because that's what we're used to. But then that black and white, then red, yellow etc. really does make sense when you think about it and how that might've came to be.
Jeremiah Smith Thank you! :) And yeah that's a good point about how we think that way largely just because of how we're made, and who knows, there's probably even more things like this that different cultures have developed in different ways that we don't even notice. ~:~
Interesting, I recall Jack White of the white stripes telling an interviewer that he chose the red, white and black colour scheme for the band because they are the most powerful and impactful colours.
'red is fundamentally more different than the others' more like humans/mammals have evolved to easily notice the colour red as noticing blood is kinda important...
@John keppelman well... you actually agreed. Red is not different than any other wavelength, it's our psyche that make it "different". .... mostly because blood is red.
That's what I thought too, but even the simulated computer populations came up with a word for red first! I need to look into those studies/results more, but I'm assuming that they didn't have the same biological or evolutionary circumstances programmed in...
red first, blue later? surely its more simple, as a cave woman mum, you tell your kids they can go play but dont eat the red berries. lots of red-is-danger in nature, not many blue berries.
There is no "natural" warning colour, or that the nature have "agreed" on a warning colour. Animals and plants use colours in different ways, some animal use them to attract opposite sex, birds sometimes use red, other animals signalling poison, such as frogs, where yellow is not uncommon.
Well, blue is the rarest color in nature, due to its unique structure, most things are "not blue”. They reflect the blue part of light, blue as a pigment is even more rare, I find it fascinating, what about an insight on blue for another video?
@@crismorgan6756 Once you learn color theory and observational skills,you ll actually see that the sky is a very desaturated blue,so it is rare,it isn t blue ,just a gray with a tint of blue.
In Filipino, we have no any direct translation of the color "Gray", we just simply call it "Kulay-Abo" which means "Ash-colored". As well as "Pink", we just call it "Kulay-Rosas" which basically means "Rose-colored" but the Philippine National Commission suggested the word "Kalimbahin" as the direct translation for "Pink" which means " a variety of guava with pink flesh". The use of language and everything about linguistics really vary by different factors like culture, geographical location, etc.
I’m Russian and I can’t help seeing light and dark blue as completely different colors (even though when I imagine the same with, for example, dark and light green, it sounds ridiculous). the problem is that siniy and goluboy aren’t even simply dark and light blue; goluboy is a warmer shade and generally more saturated. when a blue tone is really cool and soft, I will call it siniy even when it’s light. when a dark blue tone is warm-ish and saturated, I will call it dark goluboy. the only exception is when the color is almost as light or as dark as it gets, then I’ll use the darkness as the only indicator of which color to see it as.
Interestingly, that's the order in which babies acquire colour vision. In the womb and after birth they can only see light and dark, then red, yellow and green. The last colours to kick in are blue and violet.
its like how we dont call green "yellowish blue" but we call that limey colour "yellowish green" also think of colours like blush, when we were young we wouldve called it pink, but now its "blush"
Except we don't perceive green as a mix of yellow and blue, that was a surprise discovery of color science. But we do perceive "limey" as a mix of yellow and green.
@@musaran2 lime has a colour we don't see regulary in our lives, so it makes sence if we see it as something we know mixed up, plus green is more solid colour than most of mixes, while lime is seen as another green but with more yellow in it.
I'm an artist so blush to me is always light red. It forces me to understand the colour spectrum that way. Technically A yellowish blue is turquoise, but I understand what you mean. "Blush" is actually a " yellow-coral". It's all so technical.
Dearg (dar-ag) Oráiste (or-aw-shta) Buí (bwee) Glas (gloss) Gorm (g-erm) Corcra (ker-kra) Bán (b-aw-n) Bándearg (Just bán and dearg) Dubh (duh-v) Donn (down) Dugorm (doo-gorm) Liath (lee-ah) Ok that's all the colours that I can remember in Irish. They are in order of.. Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Purple White Pink Black Brown Navy Grey
+Glitchwork games Wait so it's almost like tribes couldn't form daily conversations on why the whole sky suddenly turns from black to blue every morning. It's almost like day/night wasn't important part of their life, they didn't tell stories about it, or that water didn't reflect blue. Yeah.. blue is definitely a nonsense vocab option.
The sky is often white. It can be pink, red or orange. Sometimes it's very dark. If you live in a world where the only blue is the sky at occasional times, there is no need to develop a word for the color.
Russian language have "purpurnyj" as rather a shade, while the main color called "fiolietovyj" (violet instead of purple). And in the main Ukrainian dialect of Russian language we have a second purple color at almost the same level of recognition - "sirienievyj" or "buzkovyj" in Ukrainian (means something like lilac). Might cause misunderstanding: 1:-... There, woman in a purple skirt. 2:-Where? I can't see her. 3:-In lilac skirt. 2:-See her. So Russians generaly mean "purple" speaking of "violet". Russian speaking Ukrainians have two distinct colors in place, speaking about "violet" and "lilac". It's hard to explain, but "sirienievyj" feels as more intense purple, and "fioletovyj" - as more "heavy" and/or bluish purple. It is stick into head that much so we continue to use 13-color model when we are speaking Ukrainian. They say, in Russian city of Saint Petersburg they also use "sirienievyj" more often than common shades, though I do not know for sure if they are actually share 13-color model of two purples. I find this very interesting.
@@stevemcqueenii1547 если рассматривать исторически то это потомок диалекта древне русского языка общего предка для белорусского и украинского и современного русского, а после серьезного такого географического разделение общего языкового пространства диалекты прилично обособились став считай самостоятельными
Ых... За всю жизнь так и не запомнил, что именно называют пурпурным, фиолетовым и сиреневым. Вообще это всё - маджента, а фиолетовую часть спектра человеческий глаз даже распознаёт неверно.
One thing not mentioned in the video that might be another possibility is the nature of our photoreceptors in the eye that are responsive to different wavelengths of light, the cones. There are more so-called "red" cones than "blue" cones, the special cells in the eye that receives light information and send signals to the brain. Perhaps that is another reason why red is more prominent in the naming systems - our eyes are just constructed in a way that is more sensitive to those wavelengths. Same explanation can be said for green vs blue. According to this video green is often higher in the naming hierarchy than blue and it turns out there are more "green" cones than blue cones. Maybe someone else left a similar comment but I am not going to search through over 4000 comments to see. This is just my two cents.
And we have that exact amount of cones for each color because of the sun.The sun rays are made of red,green and blue yet when they enter the atmosphere the rays loose most of the blue waves.And thus because the blue waves are truly rare we just didn't need more cones to perceive them
Dividing colors between "light", "dark" and "red" seemed weird only until I realized that's exactly how I divide laundry.
Haha Woah so true!
Pattern found! :0
😲😲😲
@@van-hieuvo8208 dude, what? I'm dye-ing to know how you got to a period joke from here.
Oh my god. Maybe our ancestors were able to distinguish and describes colors by a similar fashion in the past
This was far more interesting than I thought it was going to be.
John keppelman maybe beauty is a fact, but because we all see different we all think different things are beautiful
HelloItsMe or what if everyone has the same favorite color we just call it different things. Idk, any type of color speculation interests me
It's still interesting because regardless if it's a different red, which it isn't, we know how rods and cones work and it is illogical to think those of the same species wouldn't experience a physical effect relatively similarly, with obvious exceptions in gene mutation. We experience the emotional and pyschological effects of colors in the same way, so even if they are different colors we interpret their effects the same, like red as passion. So it doesn't matter if we might see them differently, your comment doesn't have any bearing on this. And even if we did see color differently, does that mean this is just suddenly not interesting? Honestly, wouldn't that make this idea of color patterns emerging even more interesting and an even stranger phenomenon?
I feel like the whole "do we see the same colors question" is pretty dumb. We all have the mental capacity to distinguish separate colors, and that's all that matters. Asking what a particular color "looks like" in someone else's eyes is meaningless because their brain is receiving the same particular sensations from the same particular wavelengths of light. Our brain just needed a way to tell us red is red because it isn't blue, and it isn't yellow.
Now obviously the theory of all our "color perceptions" being swapped randomly doesn't extend very far, as everyone is able to agree on which colors are complementary (opposite sides of the color wheel, i.e. red and green). Additionally, all of us are able to comprehend the "nearness" of certain colors, because everyone can agree that red is much "closer" to yellow than it is blue.
Given those limitations, I suppose the only possible permutation between people's color perception would be if one saw colors inverted from another (the color wheel being flipped around an axis, replacing each color with its complement). Regardless, we all (mostly) feel the same sensations and make the same connections about each color. Of course there's some cultural essence to colors, how red is *associated* with love and that just gets imprinted in our minds over time. I don't think there's a lot of natural evolutionary connections between emotion and colors but apparently red is evolutionary linked to hostility and danger (therefore, anger).
Anyway, point is: I think the question about whether "we see the same colors" as each other is just a sensational mind-boggler for people to ponder for a second and then move on with their lives.
yeah, it's like something out of the Bell Science series
I watched a study once where someone was exploring the idea that we dont refer to the sky as blue until we're told the sky is blue. He tested this on his 2 year old. Asking her every day what colour the sky was and never telling her what colour he thought it was. She said white until about 3 1/2.
Draziw Drow Yes and the Japanese flag is the prime example.
Because of air pollution..?!
@@채지훈-f2v No, because the sun of the Japanese flag is red so the culture of Japan has affected their perception of colour.
@@ben4675 about the color of the sky.
I dont know but this comment gave me anxiety. Idk, maybe because what we have been taught are all wrong??? I over think too much im sorry
In Kazakh "Green" and "Blue" used to have the same word "Kök". The word only meaning "Green", which is "Jasıl" became part of the language a lot later. This is why sometimes you see Juice boxes labelled as "Blue Apple", because some people are not used to the new word yet.
Haha nice kok
Кайфово, что в русском 12 цветов. Можно просто добавить прилагательное, чтобы почти полностью описать цвет для человека
same in Vietnamese! our "green" and "blue" are both the word "xanh"
The same way English manage to live with one word for light blue and dark blue.
@@yobotbeats в языках, где цветов меньше можно также просто описывать цвета. "Цвета неба", "цвета розы", "темнее дуба" и т.д.
Of course the most important colours to humans are night, day, and berry.
Maybe.
Or night, day, and bleeding...
Meat is red too
@@T1Oracle period joke?
And let's not forget the first three pigments available to mankind: Chalk, soot, and ocher . . . White, black, and red(ish)
In Uzbek language, we don't actually have any words for "grey", "orange", and "brown". If one wants to describe an object of one of these colours in Uzbek they say "colour of ash", "colour of fire", and........ "colour of liver".
@Pudgy Pudge you mean me and 32 million of other Uzbeks speak inexistent language?
@@shakhzodyuldoshboev6348 🤣🤣🤣🤣 calm down
@@O01 о, русские гопники проснулись ;)
@@O01 Джентельмены, давайте же не будем показывать русский язык не с самой лучшей стороны, прошу
@Pudgy Pudge, В корне неверно. Это другая страна просто с большим русским меньшинством.
in russia we don't really use purpurnyy for purple, we mostly say fioletovyy
Хах, точно
😈
@Reid Chrysler Manares yes
@Reid Chrysler Manares ya, we mostly use violet. Although we also use the word sirenevyy, which means purple
@@liljepolak8565 It's grayish purple usually.
In Vietnamese, there’s no word for green. There’s blue, and then there’s “leaf-blue” to describe green. So my Vietnamese parents sometimes have a hard time differentiating between objects that are green vs blue because they’re the same word. I thought it was weird until I realized it’d be like me differentiating between indigo and blue/purple, which is a color I didn’t grow up learning.
Other comments said that in vietnamese green and blue have the same name, not that green just doesn't has one. And that you differentiate between leaf-color and sea-color.
Language doesn't prevent me from distinguishing reality like colors. I learned about how English doesn't have some words like in other languages. English even borrow some words like deja vu. But that doesn't prevent me from understanding those realities even if a word for it doesn't exist. I still can see more shades of colors even if a word in English doesn't exist for it. Like different shades of blue.
It's like how someone was born deaf or some animals and never heard or learned language but still understands and sees basic realities like nature.
You said so yourself and other comments here said that there is a differentiating word for blue and green in Vietnamese and that's "leaf" and "ocean".
Perhaps it was more your parents were struggling to understand a different language.
i'm a native english and i don't know the difference between Indigo and Purple, they're both purple to me
I was always struggled with blue and green until I learned English. And I'm like "How convenient and easy it is". I realized that English is even easier to use in comparison with my mother language😂. Btw I wish our language just has "you" and "I" 🥲.
Then what do you guys call teal/turqoise????
Imagine trying to translate this video into one of the languages with 3 colours
Alex Diduk there’d probably be a lot of “the color of x”
just use kpe
@Alexander Supertramp Comparisson with other well-known objects? As he mentiont i think..?
@@tonyyyfromcroatiaa681 True. For example, in my native language, Tagalog, there's only names for red (pula), orange (kahel), yellow (dilaw), green (berde/luntian), blue (asul/bughaw), white (puti), and black (itim). We use "color _" or "color of _" when referring to other colors. Specifically, we say "kulay abo" when referring to gray in general, but "kulay ng abo" for the specific color of ash. Also, we have two* "terms" for purple, "kulay ube" (deep/midium violet) and "kulay lilak" (liliac and lavender; light violet?), and for brown, "kayumanggi" (tan/brown skin tone, for skin specifically ["kulay kayumanggi" if you want to compare the color of one object to the color of skin]) and "kulay tsokolate/kape" (for foods and drinks respectively).
*"Lila" or "Kulay Lila" is typically used as a translation for purple in general. Although I sometimes end up thinking of the Lilac color. So to separate the two, I use "Lila" for purple in general and "Lilak" for Lilac/Lavender, although that's not official. Although, we actually use the English terms "purple" and "violet" more often anyway.
@@moondust2365 that's so interesting! thanks for the insight! :)
At 1 year of age, my kids learned about which fruits they could eat from the garden. They had no problem distinguishing ripe red tomatoes and raspberries vs unripe yellow/green ones, but they had a very hard time accepting that there were ripe yellow varieties of tomatoes and raspberries. It took both of them until about 4-5 years of age to try a yellow tomato. They were convinced it was unripe, regardless of what I said. Being able to communicate red/purple, the color of many ripe fruits, vs yellow/green, the color of unripe fruit, is very important when a group must harvest their own food.
Blue is all around us in sky and water, but the blueness isn't important to distinguish for daily existence. My kids really didn't care if the sky was blue or gray or white. They just cared about it being light (day) or dark (night). Also, whether water is good to drink is not dependent on its blueness. It's more about whether it's light/clear (good to drink) or dark/murky (bad to drink).
Thanks this was helpful to me, wondering why my kids are a little bit picky about green veggies. Always wondered where that came from.
Yeah this helped me understand better too :D
Ok but gray sky indicates bad weather, wouldn't that be useful?
@@uvotminBut it doesn’t necessarily. As someone from the Seattle area, the sky is grey very often but you can tell the difference between our normal overcast days and days where it is actually rainy/stormy by the shade (light vs. dark) of grey, therefore I still think the distinction, while being more nuanced, is still not entirely necessary
@@uvotmin light and dark. light sky is clear, dark would be rain
In Bahasa Indonesia, we call the shades of a colour by age e.g. Pink it’s ‘Merah Muda’ which literally translates to ‘Young Red’ as well as the darker shades of red ‘Merah Tua’, ‘Old Red.’ It applies to blue, green and yellow too.
In my own theory, it’s like the way fruits, vegetables and paddies age because of agricultural aspect of the earlier times of the country. Just my own opinion tho.
You're probably right tho :)
What about "Buah Merah? "
I saw those drinks here in the Philippines! What does it mean? 😂😂
There's a similar pattern here in the Philippines, like in the word murang kape for the color beige, which literally means young coffee
We called pink as "Merah Jambu" because it comes from a fruit named "Jambu Air" or "Rose Apple" in English.
i collect savage photos - "Buah Merah" sounds like "Red Fruit", not sure what drink that is. Could be a fruit cocktail or *more likely a syrup.
Fun Fact, a lot of Japanese colors are metaphorical in nature. Such as brown being 茶色 literally "tea color" the same goes for yellow 黄色(amber color), gray 灰色 (ash color), and formerly blue which shared a word with green for a while. Orange and pink more recently were brought along with English.
It has to be pointed out that the Japanese language has a deep origin from Mandarin and grow out the Chinese culture itself afterwards.
In this case, 茶色 is a term from Japanese language itself.
But 青色, the color in the middle of blue and green, is from ancient Chinese. Mixing the two together is simply because of the dye then didn’t have pure light blue or green.
Actually, orange and pink have another names that don't come from English: pink is also called 桃色 ("peach color"), and orange is 橙色 ("sour orange color"). Japanese has actually many native words for things, but tend to drop some in favor of English... Which for me, as a native Spanish speaker, it's actually sad.
@@azarishiba2559 it's done in effort for Japan to be considered "European" and more westernized since Meji revolution. Also the nature of Japanese allows it to technically borrow any words from other languages and represent them in kaja in hope to look "cool" or "modern" while representing the same concept in kanji or Chinese vocabularies is considered "old." Personally, as a Chinese, I find this trend quite funny
Is it true that japanese call the green at the traffic light as "ao" which is the word for Blue?
I also understood that jaoanese use "midori " for green, but in other contexts
@@dastanjan320 They use 青 to refer to green traffic lights, apples, and several other things. The reason is that using ao can also mean a bright vibrant green.
In Turkish we dont have an actual name for brown, we call it "the color of coffee" which is *kahverengi*
kahverengi=kahve+renk+i
*Kahve* is *coffee* , *renk* is *color* and *i* is a suffix meaning *of*
woah as a Turkish person I've never realized that
Shrek Wazowski jfhvhbrndjcydh
In Turkish we call "Konur" for Brown.
Yıldırım Başkurt wait... if we already have a word for brown in old Turkish, then why dont we use it in modern Turkish?
Lol i was just thinking why doesn’t my language have anything interesting while all of those people in the comments mention something from their language
Than i saw your comment and i was like “oh sure, there’s that”
ahh yes the three primary colors, light, dark, and red.
Becus back then no one cared about any of the other primary colors
Maggie Caron yeah, that’s the joke. Well done on trying to explain it though.
well if you think about it
yellow = light
blue = dark
red = red
@Maggie Caron primary colors rely on color theory and depend on what color space you're using. in paints, red yellow and blue were historically the most readily available pigments. when talking about primary colors in relation to paint it refers to the color theory that uses these pigments.
inking is a different craft and uses a subtractive color space that's a bit different from paint. since you can't really ink on black, it instead subtracts from white.
where white is rgb
magenta is rb (-g)
yellow is rg (-b)
cyan is gb (-r)
so to make blue you'd mix magenta and cyan (-g and -r)
with this blue, you wouldn't be able to make green by adding yellow, since that would mean -b. you'd end up with black.
it's a different medium from paint with different rules.
there are also the primary colors in light, which is an additive color space.
in light there is rgb, and magenta yellow and cyan are secondary colors, because you start from black. adding these primaries together creates white.
just some color theory 101. i recommend reading more about this since it's very interesting :)
@@Torchkas2 That's really cool info! Thank you!
Even in English, many color names, even some “basic” ones, got their names from things. The _color_ orange is named after the _fruit_ orange, or rather, the fruit of the orange tree (what it was originally called). Until the English found out about oranges, they referred to that color as “reddish yellow.”
Purple comes from the purpura mussels whose shells are deep purple or navy blue, and were the source for dyes of that color range (a very expensive source of dye in ancient times, which is why it was a sign of royalty or great wealth to wear purple). Those dyes range in color from what we today would call “plum” to what we today would call “navy blue,” and would include “violet.”
In Swedish we used to call the colour orange "brandgul" - "fire yellow" when I was a kid in the 1970s. Now everyone calls it orange, although the fruit is called "apelsin" - "apple from China".
Meanwhile in Poland the violet variant is way more popular than the purpura variant. Tells you geography I guess. Had more flowers than shores
I've always wondered why Purpur means purple (I've never heard it though, I've only heard Lila or Violett) in German, I always wondered how they got Purpur and English got purple
The fact that orange as a colour was a late addition to the English language can be seen in names like "robin redbreast", a bird with a clearly orange breast.
@@nosy-cat Same for terms like "lavender", another recent addition.
In Persian language:
Blue = "Abi", translates to "watery"
Brown = "Ghahvei", translates to "from coffee"
Purple = "Banafsh", translates to "viola flower" (a purple colored flower called "banafsheh")
Yellow = "Zard", translates to "from gold" (Zar = gold)
Green = "Sabz", translates similar to the word "vegetable-y" (Sabzi = vegetable)
Orange = "Naranji", translates to another citrus similar to "orange fruit" but with a more sour taste.
Pink = "Soorati", translates to "face colored"
Gray = "Khakestari", translates to "Ash colored"
I just realized they are all comparison words other than the words for black, white, and red.
Pouya Shooliz In English, there are just orange and violet for comparison color words. We refer to vegetables as greens sometimes too, but it seems more likely that the color name existed first and started being used as a more informal term for vegetables. Here’s something interesting: first, as you may already know, English has many different sources. We can use the word soil (from Latin) and dirt (from Norse) interchangeably. In terms of colors, they all have Germanic roots except for orange (derived from your word in Persian!) and purple (derived from Greek). Purple and violet are usually seen as interchangeable in English too. So the two words that are not Germanic just happen to also be comparison words. But even some of the Germanic words are comparisons, for example white comes from weiss which also means wheat. English speakers just don’t know that it’s a representational word because white and wheat are spelled/pronounced differently. Obviously they are close, but so are green and grin and those meanings have nothing in common. So it’s not intuitive that white comes from wheat. And also, the color of wheat falls into the yellow category. According to the video, it sounds like in earlier times it would have just been grouped with the other “light” colors.
@@beckerkorn1 Wheat in German is Weizen, not Weiß, but does probably derive from the color.
Hi! English speaker trying to learn Farsi over here. :) I found some other color names and I'm curious about them.
I read that قرمز (crimson/red) is also the name for the Kermes insect (from which red dye is obtained), but I assume they came up with the name of the color before the name of the insect. سرخ apparently also means scarlet?
Then there's ارغوانی which is described as "colour of the blossom of Cercis siliquastrum (Judas tree), amethyst, mauve, purple"
Also زرشکی (wiktionary says it means "purple") comes from zereshk, a plant which in English is called barberry. So what's the difference between zereshki, arğavâni and banafsh?
The part about 'face colored' how is that so? What color would I be considered as a black person?
Nein The video is referring to how everyday objects are used to name the color itself, not how a color is used to describe objects/people.
Persian is an ancient language that was formed 5000 to 10000 years ago where the everyday people of that society were probably light brown skin. I don’t think they came into contact with an African person until much later when they formed an empire about 2500 years ago. I don’t know how they referred to a black person but given that the concept of “race” didn’t exist back then, and that Persians themselves range in color from light brown to very dark brown, they probably would have just though of blacks as regular people of another clan or tribe. In modern Persian language however, your question has a boring answer: a black person is referred to as “black person”.
Gotta love the "Wet" and "Dry" spectrum of colours
Imagine someone being rasist in this language! "Them M O I S T people are taking all our jobs!"
moist
moist
moist
moist
But, if you're thinkin' 'bout my baby, it don't matter if you're wet or dry.
moist is british slang
This comment made me spit out my coffee. Now my screen is moist, too.
The green people
Hey, what colour is your hair?
Kpe
Henry Fliss what colour's your hair: Dark
"Hey, what colour is your hair?"
*are you blind, you dumb fool?*
NO
this could habe been a jack reference i'm sad
Yes but, is it Kpe or Kpe
zKampeR it’s kpe
In Russian, "purpurnyy" can be a shade of red, purple and similar to magenta. I think the word "fioletovyy" is used more often, and it corresponds more to the shade in the video. The most accurate definitions are "sirenevyy" or "lilovyy" (lilac), which describe colors through the coloring of flowers.
Lilovyy. One of our kittens is called Lilac in English but that side of the family speaks English, Dutch, and Russian. The Russian is a very pretty name.
just refer to the colors by their hex value, duh
nah, tell them by the wavelength please
Binary is much better
@@NMPshadow BIG BRAIN
or by their pigment number lol
My classmates were once discussing which color was marsala actually, then I just sent them the color in hex definition and won the discussion.
But then I was kicked out
Ah yes, I am watching a video about colors while being colorblind, definitily my smartest idea
thats sad
me too bro hahaha
completly color blind? is that a thing?
Well it's not bad to have a bit more knowledge about stuff
@@ndpd7695 false knowledge
In Vietnamese, we call green and blue both "xanh". When we need to distinguish, we call blue as "xanh nước biển" ("xanh" of the ocean) and green as "xanh lá" ("xanh" of the leaf)
Different languages are so interesting
I've heard the same about Japanese
@@kcahdp Cuz the root is from the Chinese. It was just green, and then came "blue" but they didn't invent a word for it so it was green for both.
I have just realised that Russian and English speakers use different set of colours do describe the rainbow, though the total number of colours is still 7 for each: Russians use their unique "goluboy" (pigeon blue) color, but do not use the pink colour. Also as a Russian I never thought of pink as a separate colour, more like a lighter version of purple. It feels kinda odd because I cannot even pick the pink colour out of rainbow spectrum.
Что за бред. Загугли «цвета радуги» на английском и на русском. Разница совсем в другом. Мы не используем цвет «индиго» в качестве отдельного цвета в обычной речи. Только для уточнения (точно так же с пурпурным, каштановым и пр.). Для нас это тёмный “фиолетовый”, находящийся близко к «синему». В свою очередь «розовый» и “pink” это один и тот же цвет. Точно так же “violet” и «фиолетовый» это одно и то же. Розовый цвет сильно отличается в русской речи от фиолетового цвета, как в английском “violet” отличается от “pink”. В русской речи «голубой» и «синий» имеют такую же связь - один светлее другого. Автор видео явно не знает о такой штуке как «лингвистика». Заявлять что в русском языке только 12 обозначений цветов очевидно бессмысленно. Куда бирюзовый делся? Где фиолетовый? Зато пурпурный вставил.
@@Артем-ь6е9л он говорит про 00:53. Там указан розовый, но нет голубого. У англичан и голубой, и синий - это blue. А в русском есть дополнительно голубой.
И что-то непонятное вы про purple/violet написали. Они оба фиолетовые, просто один в тёплых оттенках, другой в холодных.
В видео речь об ОСНОВНЫХ цветах, а не о радуге. Бирюзовый мы вполне можем назвать сине-зеленый, а как ты назовешь синий, используя названия других цветов? При этом мы выделяем отдельно дополнительно голубой и розовый, когда англичане и голубой, и синий называют одним словом.
А я вижу розовый. По крайней мере на спектре в видео. Огромное пространство между красным и фиолетовым 😄 Просто радуга начинается на красном и заканчивается фиолетовым - они на краях спектра - и переход чисто физически отсутствует. Но если спетр радуги зациклить в круг или сдвинуть - вы розовый прекрасно увидите.
И здесь речь не про радугу, а про палитру цветов )
it’s really interesting because pink is just a weird color category in general. most “pink” colors are really just light red, but there is of course magenta, which is an actual point on the color spectrum, but not as commonly referred to as simply “pink”, so it makes sense why it’s difficult to pinpoint since it’s sort of an awkward label culturally.
@@dhskshdksh I'm a designer so watching this was quite intriguing to me, as people all around the globe categorize "basic" colors that are actually not... Colors (hues) but tones (light/dark, brightness values). I understand people that don't study this are not obligated to know this fact, but it's almost funny to see how humans are confusing in different ways just to be the same in the end (the clusters the video talked about)...
5:23 "Blue, on the other hand, was fairly scarce."
Water and Sky: Am i a joke to you?
I think so .. But maybe they live in the forest and the sky always white ..
I get the joke, but tbh, blue is actually rare in nature.
Water has no color - it transparent, or just reflect other objects. Color of sky useless for antient cultures, because it is just in the sky.
The sky is not blue, and it is not "azul".
It is C E L E S T E
Spanish FTW
(?
Water isnt blue its clear
In my language, yellow and green are seen as two different shades of a single colour which is similar to the colour of a ripe leaf.
We call green as leaf colour and yellow as turmeric colour.
I guess its same for all south indian (dravidian) languages
@@143kiruba in hindi... it's different for both
That makes sense to me. When I was little we would play “Slug bug” in the car and our points of contention were usually about whether a car was more yellow or greenish. My sister would call “slug bug yellow” and I would call “slug bug green” and she’d say “where?” and when I’d point to it she’d say “I already called that one. Slug bug yellow”. I’d say “But it’s not yellow, it’s a yellowish green.” Fun times.
I mean, this video is very vague, there are so much more to it, for instance the evolution of language is important, in English green and yellow are separated, but this distinction developed pretty recently, in proto-indo european there was only one word for both colours and in different language the distinction occured in different times or sometime it didn't at all. In many cases the word for yellow and the word for green came from the same old word that was used to describe both this colours by our ancestors thousands years ago.
It's not suprising that some tribes have less colours in their languages, with development of society the numbers of important colours and distinctions between them increase. Sometimes in different way in different places.
@@orangebeagle3068 We used to say "punch buggy"
I've always wondered why I can't express our "goluboy" color in English and why I have to call it "blue" when it's not blue. And now I've finally realized...
P.S. I’m getting dozens of responses so I’d like to clarify one point: it’s not about translation, actually. Indeed, “goluboy” may be called light blue/sky blue/cyan/turquoise/azure, etc. But the key point is that in Russian, we would never say that the sky is blue, because it’s not. It’s about the worldview or something. That’s why, when speaking English, we basically have to replace one colour with another to verbalize the idea of clear skies.
Call it "light blue" ! In French : "bleu clair", ( it means the same)... Same process for Spanish or German etc...
Yokami , light blue in spanish can be "celeste" or "azul claro". The first one is more appropriate, but the second is more used
Thank you so much, it's very useful as I learn French and Spanish as well. Merci and gracias!
@@writerudite Pas de problème !
In Italian we say azzurro!
Also in Russian, the words "kofeynyy" (coffee), "kirpichnyy" (brick) can be used for shades of brown, for green shades -- salatovyy, travyanoy (herbal), izumrudnyy (emerald). Sometimes colors are associated with substances like honey, sand, milk.
Yeah, I love it, you see the color and you can describe it with something that contains this color. Bolotnyy color is yellow or green? Probably somewhere in the middle
Using comparison for shades happens a lot in Spanish too. It might be universal
Кирпичный не используется как цвет, вообще такого никогда не слышала. А про травяной - так только нарик скажет.
@@jeffkod5549The dark shade of yellowish-green
@@iloveuuЯ не раз слышал кирпичный, но чаще всего его используют, как синоним к коричневому. Кирпичи имеют множество разных цветов.
I'm wondering if the reason red is so dominant in our mind is related to it being a sign of danger (poisonous animals usually have red or orange tones, fire is red-esque , etc)
While blue and green, while being widely present in the environment (plants, sea, sky) are more of a background kind of color which our mind kind of ignores.
The reason for that is, that red is Literally stronger than any other visible color. It has the longest wavelength in the visible spectrum and thus, catches our attention the most and the wavelength gets progressively shorter as you continue through the spectrum.That's why colors with shorter wavelengths seem softer or like background colors.
Khachig Ainteblian I don't believe this is true, do you know it for a fact? longer wavelength mean less energetic, not more so.
Also it's worth pointing out that our brain doesn't perceive information like that. our ears don't notice lower pitches best because they have longer wavelength, even though they are more powerful. Our brain focus on the middle range, to better notice human speech.
Khachig Ainteblian Yellow-green is actually the most visible color that the human eye is sensitive to. The human eye is most sensitive to 555nm which we perceive as yellow-green (the color yellow and green is usually where peak sensitivity is at).
Have you ever seen construction workers wearing fluorescent yellow-green vests? Highlighters?? Even tennis balls!! School busses and yellow fire hydrants are also a prime example of the color yellow being more noticeable to the human eye.
claire chen 陳嘉蓮 That makes more sense :) I wonder why yellow? is it a physical property of our eyes or some kind of processing by our brain? perhaps it's related to the color of the sun and natural light here on earth
we all know the elements
dark
light
and mostly
red
comunism
Moist red
red
-Which direction are you moving?
-Yes
That’s why red is the best
I actually called the first color "Pantone," and got confused when the next two showed up.
such a noob ;-)
NoobDoesMC SAME lmao
I did too
Ahaha same 😂😂
Hahaha this made me laugh out loud.
I once asked a Xhosa lady to teach me some words and colours were part of it. She knew only two or three colours in her language but knew the colours in English. My husband was an electrical technician in the airforce many moons ago. He once trained a Sotho guy and realised the man only knew the basic colours. They had to send him on a colour course so he could actually learn his trade. Now it makes so much sense to me.
Here’s a kinda-fun-fact of colors in Vietnam that you probably don’t care 🤷♂️:
In Vietnamese, blue and green have the same name, which is “xanh”, BUT, if you add another word after it, it will be different, so, blue in Vietnamese is “xanh DƯƠNG” or “xanh BIỂN” (that word means ocean/beach) and green in Vietnamese í “xanh LÁ” or “xanh LỤC” (i’m not actually quite sure with the second word but the first word means leaf). So that’s how you call the two colors in Vietnamese :)
Many other languages have the same word for "green" and "blue". Linguists describe them using the word "grue".
GeekMan2000 gruesomely interesting
Xanh, from Thanh, both of which are from 青 in Chinese/Hantu. 青 in Chinese have also originally meant to mean all shades of green, blue and black, but eventually Chinese would evolve words like 綠，藍 and 黑 to describe green, blue and black respectively, which is Luc, Lam and Hac in Vietnamese. Xanh duong is 青洋 (blue ocean), Xanh bien is 青𣷭 (blue sea). Xanh la is 青蘿 (green leaf/plant), Xanh luc is 青綠 (lit. green green).
G . H we care about it.
John Balce aw thanks
Yay I love being color blind watching a video about colors
William Genitempo I have a question, you know how some stuff people say they taste "green" (idk how to formulate my question so I hope you get where I am trying to go)
They have a new glass you can use to see colours
@William, same here mate!
@green alien, those glasses are more a way of tricking the eyes and brain. They can't actually rectify the internal problem which is due to the shape of the cones in one's eyes.
Livie It's called synesthesia
Person: Tells someone they are colorblind
95% of people: *points to an object * *what color is this???*
5% Oh cool
You should do a video similar to this about what other languages define as emotions
0:18 Basic color categories
1:40 Color “hierarchy”
3:46 Color-object comparison
4:02 Hanuno’o color spectrum
4:28 Berlin and Kay universal map of color
An infant sees black, white and red initially. Red stands out because of the color of blood - danger. As the cones in the retina of the eyes and the brain synapses develop and process better, then distinct differences in color become apparent when colors of food (fruits, vegetables, meats, grains, nuts, etc.) and associated experiences with those colors are learned. That's why a baby - remembering a sweet purple grape flavored lollipop - may inadvertently place a purple piece of cloth in its mouth. The cones of the retina can distinguish certain frequencies of color. Experience with those frequencies of colors that we process helps us to distinguish between those colors. I remember a study that said seeing the color Pepto-Bismol Pink will help reduce an emotional person's rage (ie: road rage). The reason: Pink is a healthy skin tone color - no red there - so the brains' association of pink goes with calm (no danger). FYI: This info is all conjecture on my part. Just wanted to share what I thought.
This needs more likes :)
I like this theory, but i doesnt explain why the AI's also picked those colours in that order
That's true, in fact there are prisons where the walls are painted pink because it's believed to be a way to keep inmates calm and avoid fights
Think red warm light is also what you see in the womb
@@nabagaca I think it would be better the other way around - the AI showing that red is more distinctive is a theory as to why we could see it first. After all, babies aren't naming colours
blue was scarce before the industrial revolution *ignores the sky*
No they said before manufacturing
But it wasn’t important to name the sky really
Yeah, if almost nothing was blue except for the sky you dont have to give that color a name since it's tied to the sky (which everyone would know) and anything with the same color would probably be 'skycolor' or you point up and say "this color".
yeah, but when you only have the sky as a blue thing, you just have your word for "sky" and that's what you use. you don't need a color-word for it. and if you had the ocean or a river that was often blue, it was still only two things, so it made more sense to name those specific things than the color they are. you only need more words for colors when you need to describe things to others, and you wouldn't really have to describe the sky to anyone. and if you wanted to describe a body of water, then you'd focus more on its shape and possibly content (fish, mud, stones, plants, whatever else) than on what water looks like, because most people would already know what water looks like. so one specific word for that color would just seem unnecessary.
The sky is always changing colour (depending on the time of day/night & weather, amongst other things) & as such is useless as an archetype for any colour...
my mother language isn't english and I've noticed that people use the word blue to describe both a lighter or a darker shade of the same color. In my language we say the word azul (blue) and celeste (light blue). I didn't know there wasn't a different word for those colors so I used to get so mad at people, I was like aRE YOU BLIND OR WHAT
also some people say turquoise but is a more specific shade of blue
lour My mother had a car that was sort of a blue-green, and everyone said it was green and that made me really mad.
I isually just say dark blue / light blue
Azul marino (navy blue) as well. But then again, In Spanish there are usually a few different ways of saying something. In my country the color "orange" can also be "mamey" which is also a fruit ^_^
in french, and france, especially in elementary school, i learned to distinctively call dark blue : bleu marine, light blue : bleu ciel, and blue (as in middle blue) : bleu, but i think as i mentioned before, it is the same in english, dark blue, light blue, cyan, blue, indigo... etc, its just shades and tones
I am from Cote d'Ivoire, the country mentioned at the beginning of the video and i'm very impressed how deep your research have been. You got one more subscriber!
What impressed me was that the two linguists were jamming out with a piano and a gut bucket.
Richard Feynman has entered the chat.
In russian purple is not for "purpurnyy", it's for "fioletovyy"
Fioletovyy is violet
@@гей_порно yes it is but first translation for fioletovyy is purple, in russian purpurnyy word is used very rarely
@@гей_порно Purpurnyy is closer to red on a spectrum. Fioletovyy is in the middle between blue and red. I think, in this video, fioletovyy is more accurate. Or it could be sirenevi.
Не, ну тебе надо было докопаться? Лично мне кажется, что сиреневый, пурпурный и фиолетовый - оттенки purple. Purple это нечто среднее
@@artemmentiy7107 пурпурный и фиолетовый - официальные переводы слова purple, вот только среди основных цветов спектра есть фиолетовый, но нет пурпурного, спроси у радуги
This is so weird that we, Russians, have a separate word for light blue, making it a basic colour in our language
ouhhhh its like pink
Spanish speaking people have a separated word for "light blue" too, and used as a basic color
@@sebastianalejandro481 CELESTE
We, Greeks, too! The color of the Ocean is different from the color of the sky!
In Italian it's called azzurro or celeste
I remember learning in my linguistic class in college that some Native American/Alaskan tribes had multiple words for blue to explain the ocean, ice, rivers, ponds, etc. It's been so long ago I can't remember
I also heard te inuit people have many words for white to distinguish thin and bulky ice
Red is Nature's warning color. Survival makes it most important.
I'm intending to show insects and plants tell you, and snakes and frogs too, don't eat me color is red.
nature evolved to have red as a warning BECAUSE it is so widely perceived by animals and humans, not the other way around!
Works both ways. Evolution is not a "because" thing. You cannot prove a direction because there isn't any. It IS widely perceived because animals that used it as warning and those who perceived the warning "agreed" that it works. The ability to create red is what made it a useable pigment. 3 perceivable colors (cones on retina). Green would not work, becasuse of chlorophyl. Blue would not work because of light scattering in atmospshere, and reflecting in water (etc). Red got used because the others would not work.
Ok but what about the computers?
As a colourblind man, I see your two 'red' berries and eat the brown one ;)
I'm color blind but I'm still watching a video about color names for the same color!! :)
Hilarious!
Vyrkhan SAME!
pro, deutro or tri?
Vyrkhan Can you distinguish colors from eachother?
Same here ! I was sure I was not the only one. Ahah
So i just dyed my brown hair purple and blue, *it's called kpe*
Kappa
I did my graduation paper about the history of the Kuna natives in the border between Panamá and Colombia and thought it was intriguing they didn't have a name for "green" or "blue" in their language. To them, the color of leaves and the sky was just a background dark or light color by default 🌳🌬🌿
This is false. In soviet Russia we have only two colors. Red and Grey. All other colors are bourgeois propaganda.
Ned Gold Lol...😂😂😂 pure gold
On another topic, if the amount of dedicated color words a language has is an indicator of how "civilized" that culture is, wouldn't that mean Russians are objectively superior to us Angloes?
+
la .alEksolas. Russians are greatest nation, we can first into space AND kill nazis.
Btw, since Russians think of what I'll call "cyan" (which 0:26 says you guys call "siniy", but someone else in these comments said that siniy and goluboy are actually reversed in that chart) as being an independent color rather than a special kind of blue, then what colors are the sky and water in Russian?
1:40 Color "Hierarchy"
3:46 Color-object comparison
4:02 Hanuno'o color spectrum
4:28 Berlin and Kay universal map of color
😇💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓👨🎓😋
567890ffbgggggbhh b gggyfr5 f Dr tddrr
Andrlk
Vox : “Red is the most distinct color”
red-green colorblind people : 👁👄👁
@@FirstnameLastname-uo3yu Are you sure you know what you read?
@@FirstnameLastname-uo3yu No, I meant that he said "most distinct" not "most people".
Bananaforscale okay then.
just refer to the colors by their hex value, duh
I am one😭😭😭
In Telugu, the word "paccha rangu" is used to describe both yellow and green. However, to specify the color green, the term "aaku paccha" is used, where "aaku" translates to "leaf," highlighting the leaf-green shade associated with the color.
The fascinating thing about this is that even before humans, you can find signs of colour hierarchy. For instance, the bacteria in the "The sun is a deadly lazer" times of Earth could detect different "colours" with primitive light-sensitive chemicals. The bacteria also knew only two colours: Light, which meant danger, and dark, which meant safety.
Waddle Derp THE SUN IS A DEADLY LASER
Can we go on land? NO. why not? THE SUN IS A DEADLY LASER.
Lucas Whitfield Not anymore, there‘s a blanket.
That's not really color sensitivity, but general light sensitivity.
thast so wild how do the scientists know this?? did they go back n ask??
“To the natives, Greenblue is a pure color, primordial almost, undifferentiated by a nature that refuses to divide them. The Aztecs referred to the sea as ‘Celestial Water’ because they pondered that the ‘Green Sea’ melted with the ‘Blue Sky’ across a channel in the horizon.” (Eulalio Ferrer Rodríguez, 2000)
In other words it wasn't a color, more like a universal holiness like brightness of light or darkness of night.
I love topics like these that connects how human minds work as a whole even across the world.
Fundamental words to describe colours in Hindi, my native language.
1. Kaala/Shyam - Black
2. Safed/Shwet - White
3. Laal - Red
4. Hara - Green
5. Peela - Yellow
6. Neela - Blue
7. Bhoora - Brown
8. Bhagva - Ochre
Colours derived from other objects (but are colours of significance in India).
8. Gulabi - Pink (trans. like rose)
9. Narangi - Orange (trans. like orange fruit)
10. Baingani - Purple (trans. like eggplant)
11. Dhusar/Saleti - Grey (trans. like dust/slate)
12. Jaamuni - Violet (trans. like Indian blackberry)
13. Firoza - Turquoise (trans. like turquoise stone)
14. Khaki - Light tan (trans. like soil)
15. Katthai - Maroonish brown (trans. like Indian acacia)
humans : create names for colors
also humans : y did we create these names for these colors
We just forgot it while we've been doing it
In Turkish the color “brown” is said “the color of coffee”
Maybe the people who did the survey were from those locations?
In Mexico too.
I wonder which came first for orange in English: the fruit or the color?
in greek too
I'm Bulgarian and in our language It works in the same way - ''kafyavo'' (lit. ''coffee-like''). Albanian seems to do It too. It's the Balkan sprachbund in action.
I’m an idiot. It took me 5 minutes into the video to realize this wasn’t about people’s names like Scarlet, Jade, Violet, etc. 😶
yeah, same! Straight up thought that
Huh?
Yeah, I thought that that was what this was about too
@@IndellableHatesHandles
Read this comment again, then read the title of this video.
I don't understand how you would mess that up.
i did not even know that about the colours in the philippines! but now that i’m breaking it down,, it makes sense.
we have our own words for red (pula) and black (itim, also meaning dark) but our words for blue (asul) and pink (rosas) come from spanish words.
青 means both “blue” and “green” in Japanese. In the olden days it was used interchangeably, but nowadays 青 tends to mean blue and 緑 green. However they still describe stop lights today as 青 rather than 緑
Seriously dude? Did you thought for a moment that we can understand these things?
Because ao or blue has less syllables then midori or green. So it’s kind of a short cut. You ask any person what color is this with a picture of green they will say midori and never ever say ao. If you show them blue and ask what color it is they will always say ao. It’s a shortcut.
NHK TV in Japan in the :Choko-san in Shikareta" program broadcast last week explained WHY 青 means both “blue” and “green” in Japanese in traffic lights. This comes from a single newspaper article describing the first stop light in Japan, located in Hibiya, central Tokyo. The newspaper article stated that the color was 青 (blue). In those days the photos were all black-white, so nobody knew the difference, and the general public repeated what they were told, that traffic lights included the color blue. Somehow this has continued to this day, even though everyone knows that the color is green. You see similar cultural attributes for the color of the sun, which some cultures describe as "red" (Japan and Russia, for example), some describe as "yellow" (US and England, for example), and many describe as "white". Human eyes are adapted for sunlight, so the light of the sun a noon naturally is seen as "white", but the official color changes according to culture.
I don't get it, what's the point of naming two different colors the same? Confusing people or what? The sky and the grass doesn't have the same color, therefore the sky and the grass shouldn't be named as 青 when referring to the color.
Oh I read your comment now, so it all comes from a missunderstanding..
@vox could also include some notes on the neuroscience of perception. The way eyes/brains digest colour may rely on the following (in order of simplicity):
1. Contrast (thus, black/white)
2. Color processing pathways: the color-perceiving cone cells are attuned to light/dark, red/green, blue/yellow; perhaps why these contrasts develop in language first.
3. Hue/Luminosity/Saturation interactions (due to the structure of the light spectrum and our visuo-neural pathways, 'red' appears bright, very saturated and NOT washed out. Green/yellow are bright but are so close to white that they can appear less saturated and therefore seem to have less contrast. Blue/purple are the darkest colors, and closest to black.)
4. Salience (red is blood/dirt - red is also poison/food/fire: all things dangerous or important for survival and, importantly, typically rare! Green/yellow are found plentifully in the environment and often don't connote danger, thus don't command attention as much. Blue/purple are rare naturally except in the sky - and a blue sky rarely signifies much regarding immediate danger/reward. Purples are extremely rare anywhere.)
5. Cultural Amplification of the Above
I love how the "Blue wasn't common before manufacturing" line has incited many comments. But all of them reference the sky and sea (which is ironically colorless). I think this unintentionally proves his point seeing we can only come up with two things.
But those two things are everywhere.
@@IsomerMashups Yes, and things that are everywhere, like oxygen, fade into the background. For a color to be deserving of a name, it needs to manifest itself in as many *distinct* objects it can.
@@leonardodavinci4259 what? Except when you look up you can see the blue of what we call sky and you can't see oxygen. Oxygen doesn't fade into the background because it's everywhere, it fades into the background because you can't detect it with your eyes.
@@girlgamer4444 Fair point. My analogue was perhaps lacking.
Thought I believe my point still stands.
@@leonardodavinci4259 yea your point was fair but adding a stupid example can make the whole argument seem stupid.
Did you know that in Vietnam, "màu xanh" both means blue and green. They are diffrenciated by adding "dương" for blue and "lá cây"/"lá" (which means leaf) for green. So: màu xanh dương is blue and màu xanh lá is green
Similarly, in the Middle Ages, we didn't have individual names for all colours like we do today. Colours tended to be named after their shades. So purple, would have been called blue, orange would have been called red etc.
This is the reason we call people with orange hair redheads.
Until the naranga tree (orange tree) came from Asia, the general term for orange was "yellow-red" in many languages.
pyropulse, interestingly, I think for the Romans and Babylonians the word "purple" was a word that referred to the dye or animal, not to the color exclusively, which would make it not pass the movie's definition. just guessing
pyropulse Chill. The whole point of the video is this is that as a language/culture grows and evolves it gains more color terms. The Romans were ahead of that English base language, whatever it’s called
wrong. please read Pastoureau :)
Just because a term exists, doesn't mean it's going to be commonly used in the vernacular.
I mean, you don't USUALLY call things maroon, or cinnabar, do you?
Me: 'art student who has spent years learning colours and colour theory" *WELP* "throws out paint"
black is a nice colour huh?
@@gorillaglued Black and white goes with most things.
Me: How do you go through life with just three words for all the colors?
Inuits: How do you go through life with just one word for snow?
The Inuit thing is actually not true. They combine words similar to German and ppl use that to make the claim they have a ton of words for snow.
Sleet
Many plains indian tribes had hundreds of words for horses. A tall, old, skinny, bay horse may have a name of its own. While a 2 year old, grey, stallion with a black tail and white mane could have its own name. Inuits:snow::Native plains tribes:horses.
@@ringofasho7721 Smells fishy to me. They didn't even have horses before the Iberian palefaces rode them in.
@@FlushGorgon just look it up if you dont believe it. And I didn't say they've had hundreds of horse words for thousands of years, I'm well aware that Europeans brought the horses. I remember trying to learn Caddo and thinking they have entirely too many names for horses. Btw, horses were in America before people ever crossed the land bridge and hunted them out. Same thing with camels (which had their origins in America, and migrated out to Asia)
This is very interesting to me as an artist. This also makes sense why Red-Black is more common and feels more natural than say Yellow-Black or Blue-Black. This can actually be a more accurate way to understand color harmony and how we perceive each color.
This is why I love language so much! Learning another language gives you a different insight into life elsewhere!
i think that's absolutely true
Me-i think all primary colors now are
Red
White
Black
There you go kids your primary colors
No
Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms
they were for the ancient egyptains, more specifically... red and black. Referring to the silt type, black silt being near the nile delta creating the best farmland and red being the desert that protects them from both sides.
5:25 "Blue is fairly scarce"
*sees sky and ocean
Conspiracy Theory: There wasn't an ocean or sky before Mark Zuckerberg and his lizardman army.
Maybe the blue of the sky is just seen as a neutral background, therefore needing no description.
Living, as I do, in New England, I see the ocean as “dark.”
The sky is black it's just that the sun reflects on the sky giving it a blue color when it's night it shows its real color sin e the sun isn't there
In ancient Chinese, those are described to be either white (苍, azure) or green (青, teal/cyan).
In fact, anything from almost yellow-ish green (newborn grass), to pure blue (navy blue I guess, also the color of a plant-based blue dye) is considered "green". Maybe there just isn't a need to separate them apart.
nope, 青 in ancient Chinese means blue here, in Japanese and Chinese, green and blue were the same (青), till modern days Chinese use a new word for green, and Japanese use another word for blue.
3:44 CORRECTION: The Indonesian language is called "Bahasa Indonesia" in Indonesian and "Indonesian" in English. The word "bahasa" simply means "language".
They gets things wrong in Indonesia lol
Guys, you mixed up Siniy and Goluboy on Russian scheme. They should switch places. Source: am from Russia
Edit: Vox fixed it up!
Cheeki breeki?
cyka blyat?
Ned Gold i v damki?
Ileane Against The Wall Marry me? You'd fit in perfectly in my town that is like over half Russian or Ukrainian.
Ты из Бурятии?
I've just realized that russian "rozovyy" comes from "rose", so it's quite comparative. However, we don't use it as "the color of rose", it's just a fun-fact from etymology.
In German language there is also the word "rosa" for the 🌹 as for the colour
Similar to 'orange' in English. Orange is the fruit which the colour probably derived it's name from
Also violet, like the flower.
У нас если читать последние 2 буквы это ЫЙ или ИЙ в английском проще YY, КРАСНЫЙ - KRASNYY, почему не IY, а YY интересно
Хочешь прикол в том же духе? Разбери слово наслаждаться.
На-*СЛАЖ*-даться
От слова сладкий.
Its actually the same thing in Portuguese! The word for pink is “the color of rose”, how interesting
Here are some colors in Japanese.
yellow kiiro(or yellow)
blue ao(or blue)
indigo-blue aiiro
purple murasaki(or purple)
pink pinku(or momoiro)
red aka(or reddo)
orange orange(or daidai)
brown brown(or brown)
black kuro(or blacku)
gray haiiro(or grey)
white shiro(or white)
The vocabularies in our language are becoming more and more English.
More and more languages are imported and vocabularies are replaced in Japanese.
What we used to call "Keitai-denwa" are now "Smartphone（スマートフォン）".
We don't have a original Japanese word for "card" So we just say card(カード) .
We don't say "zubon" anymore. We say "pants".
There are even words that were changed like paso-com(short for personal computer)and it's on the dictionary.
"I bought pants at the department store with my credit card" will be like
"デパートメントストアでパンツをクレジットカードで買った"
"department store de pants wo credit card de katta" in english this will be like
"department store at pants the credit card with bought" (yes everything is backwards)
Pronunciations are different from that of in english, but I feel like we are abandoning our language.
Maybe it's our nature to do so. We have 2 alphabets (and a bunch of Chinese characters) and one of it, which is called Katakana, is used to make a foreign word into Japanese.
For example: Eng：pants→JP：パンツ(pronounsed pantsu)
Why did I even write this here. Maybe I'm just tired. So longaybowser!
It's a bit strange. I once saw a sign that said "リーズナブル・プライス".
This increased integration of English words into the Japanese lexicon has actually made it harder on me, as someone learning Japanese, because I actually sometimes find it more difficult to read English words in Katakana (and determine where one word begins and ends) than to just read the actual Japanese word for it. Idk, that's just a weird quirk of mine.
I'm a Chinese, and I think it is a shame that Japanese are stop using Kanji or Japanese words making new words (for example, 携帯電話), they just adopt English pronounciation(Katakana)
isn’t hiragana, katakana and kanji? i’ve tried learning japanese but with the “old family” speaking the 1980’s dialect and my parents/younger family knowing the 1990’s alterations, is HARD!! my dad knows kanji and i’ve given up on trying that, even tho i want to learn it because is so beautiful! katakana is like my crutch and even then, i know 0.001% )-:
thanks for this whole big comment!
It's also weird because
Chairo (brown) means color of tea
Barairo (pink) means color of flower
Hairo (grey) color of ashes
Sharing this with my animation team tomorrow as we have artists from all over the world. So cool!
When your colorblind and you have no idea what they're talking about.
Hehe
Tate; First came dark gray, then light gray. Then gray blood, gray dirt and, then gray wheat, until at the end we come to the frilly gray of princess dresses. Easy.
fex144 Im pretty sure that color blind people still see some colors and not only gray
When your cant spell and need to use their grammar. :p
There are many different types and degrees of colour blindness.
People with monochromatic vision can only see shades of gray.
Blue is the rarest pigment in nature. (Even when you look at the sky(thats not a pigment)) There is only one butterfly that has a blue pigment. The other "blue" butterflys have microscopic structures on their scales that actually refract light in a way so that only blue light comes back out. Blue can be harvested from only two places i know of. Yes there are blue flowers but ive never seen them wild before. Myssels, and some plant native to california. Green is the most abundant color in nature (plants). With red being the second most abundant(blood). Brown after that because of tree trunks, dirt, "waste".
Hope youve learned something interesting from this. Have a good day whoever reads this!
And yet, humans have blue eyes.
Isaac Westawski I don't think blood is more common than dirt...
Isaac Westawski what about blue minerals?
There are definitely a lot of different blue flowers! Forget-me-nots are objectively blue, and there are some anemones (of the flower kind) that are blue or indigo (which I would call dark blue or violet depending on hue honestly, but I admit to realising you may think differently). At least one more that I can see in our backyard as a wild flower comes to mind that's indigo-ish, but I don't know what it's called. And that's just the natural ones that are common right where I live!
If the sky during day is blue, it is abundant. Who cares if it is a pigment or not? So a random person looking at the horizon during the day would see blue, green and brown. How can you say something is not abundant if it accounts for half of the horizon of a person? And at night he would see mostly black.
The only explanation I can come of is that ancients called blue "light", and black "dark". For whatever reason green and red was not considered light, but a color of its own.
Yo, vox. Kenya ain't Tanzania.
Jamie Mackay noticed that too (3:40)
Jamie Mackay those fools got confused on my country
Jamie Mackay, thank you for noticing that + they highlighted the Tanzanian map too, SMDH!
Jamie Mackay, thank you for noticing that + they highlighted the Tanzanian map too, SMDH!
Those countries are fairly industrialized
In my native language, Vietnamese, we consider blue and green to be shades of the same color. To distinguish between the two, you have to qualify it by saying "sea color" or "plant color".
On a random note, we have two words with crabs. It's interesting to see where a language and people's priorities lie.
well, if you were on a fishing boat for 75% of your life, you would probably need to distinguish species of fish more often than colors
Sonoma Calling! We also have plenty weird ways to describe yellow so yeah, and the word father in some of out dialects is the word bug in others so yeah language is weird.
so jungle just blend in the sky ... interesting
Yang It doesn't work like that. To us those are 2 different colors, we just use the same word for it. So to distinguish we add objects in front, like plant, sea, sky, etc
Yang It's the same as English, where until recently orange is a shade of red
Great video ! Indeed it's interesting to see that in French, the color names switch to comparisons to material things after the six main colors (+ grey/"gris") :
brown : "marron" = some kind of chesnut with a deep brown shell
pink : "rose" = like the flower
burgundy : "bordeaux" = like the wine from the city of Bordeaux
purple : "violet" = like the viola flower (violette in French)
orange : "orange" = like the fruit
and so on
Most of these words sound like their Spanish counterparts...
Some thoughts (warning: this is long, but personally I think it's worth it to read it):
1. Most people separate their laundry into darks, lights, and reds. And I know that's mainly so the colors don't bleed too much but hey who's to say we couldn't separate our laundry into blue-ish colors, yellow-ish colors, and reddish colors? But we still do darks, lights, and reds. So I wonder if the black, white, red thing mentioned in the video has developed in other societies in ways like that.
2. I've heard of some tribal language in Africa where they don't have specific words for numbers. They only have words for a lot, a little, more than, less than, and so on. So that kinda reminded me of this, and I wonder if there's any sort of language pattern for numbers and stuff like that across world languages.
3. When it was talking about the language that only had a few specific color words but had other words that coresponded to common objects that had that color, it reminded me of color words in Japanese; basically way way back in the day, the Japanese didn't have words for gray, pink, or orange. (The majority of the lastly-developed colors in societies as mentioned in the video.) If they wanted to describe something that was gray, they said ねずみ色 (pronounced nezumi iro, which translates to "mouse color") and if they wanted to describe something pink they would say 桃色 (pronounced momo iro and translating to "peach color"). Also correct me if you know more about this but for orange (I knew the ones for gray and pink already but I had to look up the old word for orange so correct me if I'm wrong) they said 橙色 (daidai iro) which actually translates somewhat to "orange color". However, nowadays, they usually say グレイ、ピンク、and オレンジ or オレンジ色, which are pronounced "gurei", "pinku", and "orenji" or "orenji iro", which are all pronounced like the English words for those colors, so I guess they developed more as their language was influenced by other cultures.
4. Lastly, I am grapheme synesthetic, meaning I relate things like numbers and letters to colors. Synesthesia is very rare but I was wondering if people who live in a region or speak a language where less focus is put on varying types of colors have less of a chance of having color-linked synesthesia of any sort, or if there is any link like that. I mean as far as I know, if you have synesthesia, you're just born with it, but maybe people who have the grapheme form and speak languages where there are fewer color groupings don't realize that they have it, because they don't think about separating colors into such specific groups and applying them to such big groups like letters or numbers. (By the way I'm not trying to say that would make them stupid or anything; it's just a random neuroscience-y question.)
If you survived this far through my nerd freak-out session, congratulations, you get a gold star. Thank you and good day. And please reply with any other thoughts!!
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what i find really funny is that we are shook that they call blue sky cause that's its color but fail to notice that orange is called orange because that's the color of the fruit,,,,,
nihilistic trash Ha ha yeah, but maybe that begs the question of "Which came first, orange the color or orange the fruit?" I mean I don't know, most likely they would have said something along the lines of, "This fruit is called an orange and we don't have any other word for the color of this fruit so we're just gonna call that color orange," but hey maybe they were like, "Okay this is the color orange and we don't have a name for this fruit but it's the same color as the color we call orange so why don't we call it an orange?" I mean who's idea was it to call a fly a fly? These are the questions, people...
Anyway I'm just overanalyzing stuff for fun. Thanks for your comment. :)
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That was an interesting read, and after this video it really does make you realize how much of the categories we've made and accustomed ourselves to really is just a big spectrum. And circumstance just has it that we divided it in certain ways depending on our environment and biology etc. Like number systems being based on the number of fingers we have, to how we divide colors. It can be so hard to break out of these categories that we've made, it seems absurd and just not normal to not have a word for blue or having a 12 based number system because that's what we're used to. But then that black and white, then red, yellow etc. really does make sense when you think about it and how that might've came to be.
Jeremiah Smith Thank you! :) And yeah that's a good point about how we think that way largely just because of how we're made, and who knows, there's probably even more things like this that different cultures have developed in different ways that we don't even notice.
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Regarding your second point, the language without numbers isn’t in Africa, it’s a tribal language in south america in the amazon called Piraha
Interesting, I recall Jack White of the white stripes telling an interviewer that he chose the red, white and black colour scheme for the band because they are the most powerful and impactful colours.
'red is fundamentally more different than the others' more like humans/mammals have evolved to easily notice the colour red as noticing blood is kinda important...
John keppelman But do you associate that directly with the color or with things that are that color?
@John keppelman
well... you actually agreed. Red is not different than any other wavelength, it's our psyche that make it "different". .... mostly because blood is red.
John keppelman that's way too social... but still some of it seems salvageable.
That's what I thought too, but even the simulated computer populations came up with a word for red first! I need to look into those studies/results more, but I'm assuming that they didn't have the same biological or evolutionary circumstances programmed in...
red is also a pretty common warning color in nature
One of the most memorable episodes of Radiolab was their exploration of this issue, beginning with Gladstone's Homer. Cool stuff.
red first, blue later? surely its more simple, as a cave woman mum, you tell your kids they can go play but dont eat the red berries. lots of red-is-danger in nature, not many blue berries.
Lol
Yes! Also ‘Blueberries’ are actually purple/black
That does not explain the computer simulation
Blue would just be dark
There is no "natural" warning colour, or that the nature have "agreed" on a warning colour.
Animals and plants use colours in different ways, some animal use them to attract opposite sex, birds sometimes use red, other animals signalling poison, such as frogs, where yellow is not uncommon.
-"Blue was rare before industrial revolution"
-Sky: "Am i a joke to you?"
-Violets: "You guys got colors?"
Where else would it be outside of the sky? Certainly nothing especially tangible and common.
The sky isn't blue all the time.
hay Violet's they used you before blue.
Well, blue is the rarest color in nature, due to its unique structure, most things are "not blue”. They reflect the blue part of light, blue as a pigment is even more rare, I find it fascinating, what about an insight on blue for another video?
Sky?
Sky? Blue Ocean? Maybe as pigment Is rare but It Is not rare at all in nature.
@@crismorgan6756 Once you learn color theory and observational skills,you ll actually see that the sky is a very desaturated blue,so it is rare,it isn t blue ,just a gray with a tint of blue.
What about birds and some insects?
@@kazuo398 Well,those birds with amazing colors including blue are quite rare.Idk about insects
the whole premise of the video was undermined a little by the fact that at the beginning I said "navy, chocolate, plum"
Kelly Corless Yay! Someone else! I said "navy, violet and dark brown. " I wish they'd gone into more complex color names a little
Kelly Corless yeah, "steel blue, sepia, violet"
the whole premise of your comment is undermined by the fact that you have Ted Cruz's face as your pic
Kelly Corless i thought grey-blue, violet, coffee lol
Kelly Corless YES OMG
When someone says taste the rainbow, this isn't what they meant.
Do they do drugs?
@@chrono-glitchwaterlily8776 yes Skittles.
In Filipino, we have no any direct translation of the color "Gray", we just simply call it "Kulay-Abo" which means "Ash-colored". As well as "Pink", we just call it "Kulay-Rosas" which basically means "Rose-colored" but the Philippine National Commission suggested the word "Kalimbahin" as the direct translation for "Pink" which means " a variety of guava with pink flesh". The use of language and everything about linguistics really vary by different factors like culture, geographical location, etc.
I’m Russian and I can’t help seeing light and dark blue as completely different colors (even though when I imagine the same with, for example, dark and light green, it sounds ridiculous). the problem is that siniy and goluboy aren’t even simply dark and light blue; goluboy is a warmer shade and generally more saturated. when a blue tone is really cool and soft, I will call it siniy even when it’s light. when a dark blue tone is warm-ish and saturated, I will call it dark goluboy. the only exception is when the color is almost as light or as dark as it gets, then I’ll use the darkness as the only indicator of which color to see it as.
"Black
Then
White are
All I see
In my infancy
Red and yellow then came to be
Reaching out to me
Lets me see"
- Tool - Lateralus
searched for this comment
NICE A MAN OF CULTURE
Best album ever
Interestingly, that's the order in which babies acquire colour vision. In the womb and after birth they can only see light and dark, then red, yellow and green. The last colours to kick in are blue and violet.
its like how we dont call green "yellowish blue" but we call that limey colour "yellowish green"
also think of colours like blush, when we were young we wouldve called it pink, but now its "blush"
An artist friend had an unsolved argument: is that yellow, green, chartreuse (a thing to drink) green, or neon green? fluorescent green or yellow?
Except we don't perceive green as a mix of yellow and blue, that was a surprise discovery of color science.
But we do perceive "limey" as a mix of yellow and green.
@@musaran2 lime has a colour we don't see regulary in our lives, so it makes sence if we see it as something we know mixed up, plus green is more solid colour than most of mixes, while lime is seen as another green but with more yellow in it.
I'm an artist so blush to me is always light red. It forces me to understand the colour spectrum that way. Technically A yellowish blue is turquoise, but I understand what you mean. "Blush" is actually a " yellow-coral". It's all so technical.
Dearg (dar-ag)
Oráiste (or-aw-shta)
Buí (bwee)
Glas (gloss)
Gorm (g-erm)
Corcra (ker-kra)
Bán (b-aw-n)
Bándearg (Just bán and dearg)
Dubh (duh-v)
Donn (down)
Dugorm (doo-gorm)
Liath (lee-ah)
Ok that's all the colours that I can remember in Irish. They are in order of..
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Purple
White
Pink
Black
Brown
Navy
Grey
I actually remembered these when I read them
I thought u people spoke celtic.
Bulidrians Naw, Irish, but most people just speak English.
Is brea liom gaeilge
AYYYY
In english too, we have words which describe both a colour and a feeling (though it’s a colloquial use) like I’m feeling blue
"Blue was a rare colour before manufacturing"
Looks out of the window most everyday and sees a blue sky smh
you can't take dyes from the sky
+Glitchwork games Wait so it's almost like tribes couldn't form daily conversations on why the whole sky suddenly turns from black to blue every morning. It's almost like day/night wasn't important part of their life, they didn't tell stories about it, or that water didn't reflect blue.
Yeah.. blue is definitely a nonsense vocab option.
The sky is often white. It can be pink, red or orange. Sometimes it's very dark. If you live in a world where the only blue is the sky at occasional times, there is no need to develop a word for the color.
Too bad it's rare now due to climate change
Yeah I didn't understand that either, especially with people who live near water
Russian language have "purpurnyj" as rather a shade, while the main color called "fiolietovyj" (violet instead of purple).
And in the main Ukrainian dialect of Russian language we have a second purple color at almost the same level of recognition - "sirienievyj" or "buzkovyj" in Ukrainian (means something like lilac). Might cause misunderstanding:
1:-... There, woman in a purple skirt.
2:-Where? I can't see her.
3:-In lilac skirt.
2:-See her.
So Russians generaly mean "purple" speaking of "violet".
Russian speaking Ukrainians have two distinct colors in place, speaking about "violet" and "lilac". It's hard to explain, but "sirienievyj" feels as more intense purple, and "fioletovyj" - as more "heavy" and/or bluish purple. It is stick into head that much so we continue to use 13-color model when we are speaking Ukrainian. They say, in Russian city of Saint Petersburg they also use "sirienievyj" more often than common shades, though I do not know for sure if they are actually share 13-color model of two purples.
I find this very interesting.
@@stevemcqueenii1547 Лол, так так и есть. Я сам украинец и ничего в этом стыдного нет.
@@Orglash-il7yc да я не про стыдное. ну какой нафиг "диалект"? ну ,камон, хватит делать украинский язык недоязыком.
@@stevemcqueenii1547 если рассматривать исторически то это потомок диалекта древне русского языка общего предка для белорусского и украинского и современного русского, а после серьезного такого географического разделение общего языкового пространства диалекты прилично обособились став считай самостоятельными
Ых... За всю жизнь так и не запомнил, что именно называют пурпурным, фиолетовым и сиреневым. Вообще это всё - маджента, а фиолетовую часть спектра человеческий глаз даже распознаёт неверно.
Was looking for this comment omg
One thing not mentioned in the video that might be another possibility is the nature of our photoreceptors in the eye that are responsive to different wavelengths of light, the cones. There are more so-called "red" cones than "blue" cones, the special cells in the eye that receives light information and send signals to the brain. Perhaps that is another reason why red is more prominent in the naming systems - our eyes are just constructed in a way that is more sensitive to those wavelengths. Same explanation can be said for green vs blue. According to this video green is often higher in the naming hierarchy than blue and it turns out there are more "green" cones than blue cones.
Maybe someone else left a similar comment but I am not going to search through over 4000 comments to see. This is just my two cents.
Never thought of that, very interested theory, sounds plausible!
And we have that exact amount of cones for each color because of the sun.The sun rays are made of red,green and blue yet when they enter the atmosphere the rays loose most of the blue waves.And thus because the blue waves are truly rare we just didn't need more cones to perceive them
And that is because our somewhat distant ancestors were fruit eaters. (most ripe fruits are red-ish)
Colourblind people: *Ah yes...*
🤣🤣🤣
Not only the subject matter was amazing, the presentation was phenomenal! One of your best, Vox. Thank you.