Our brains differentiate between the colors we are used to automatically and with ease. Most of the time color seems like a clearly defined quality of the objects we are looking at. As far as the way we perceive the world, color is one of the fundamental characteristics of the world around us.

But it turns out that the distinctions between colors are very often quite arbitrary and dependent on culture.

The Blue-Green Distinction

For instance, look at the image on the right, chances are your brain instantly recognized the difference between the two main colors in the image - green and blue. But the distinction between them is not always that clear and there are some languages that use the same word for both colors. For the native speakers of those languages, the image on the left contains two different hues of the same color. For those cases, linguists have come up with the word grue to describe the color that includes both green and blue.

And example of such a languages is Vietnamese where there is a single word that is used for both green and blue - xanh (青). The grass, the tress, the sky and the ocean in Vietnamese are all the same color - grue. In Vietnamese, if you want to differentiate between green and blue, you have to use special modifiers like saying sky grue (xanh da trời), ocean grue (xanh dương) or leaves grue (xanh lá cây) depending on the specific hue you want to refer to.

Another example might be Japan where the distinction between green and blue is much more fluid than it is in English. To demonstrate this one can look at this billboard from Okazaki depicting traffic lights. Notice how the go lights are actually blue instead of green. While this might feel strange to most of us, Japanese people would see this depiction as reasonable and understandable enough. To them it's all ao (青) which seems to use the same hieroglyph as Vietnamese.

More Colors Than You Think

But before you start feeling superior because your language distinguishes between blue and green, keep in mind that you are always likely to find languages that differentiate between colors that are hues of the same color in your own language. For instance, Russian has two different words for two shades of blue - what we call sky blue or baby blue in Russian is голубо́й while the regular or navy/dark blue is си́ний. It's actually the exact same distinction for blue that red and pink serve in English for red. There are indeed languages that don't have a separate word for pink.

There are indeed all kinds of different distinctions that different languages seem to make and there are even more drastic examples. For instance, what look like two very similar types of green to me on the image below are supposedly classified as blue (on the left) and yellow (on the right) in Japanese! But there are all kinds of other examples of these types of phenomenons like no differentiation between orange and brown or blue and black.

Conclusion?

It's time for pop art!

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15527531
• https://www.daytranslations.com/blog/2017/05/language-changes-color-blue-green-distinction-8768

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