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Blue-green across cultures!

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ManicGenius
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United States
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 Message 9 of 17
03 June 2010 at 7:35pm | IP Logged 
Also I doubt males percieve purple as a red variant. Looks bluish to me.
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Volte
Tetraglot
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 Message 10 of 17
03 June 2010 at 8:11pm | IP Logged 
ManicGenius wrote:
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
At the risk of offending every single male on the forum, I feel tempted to point out, that a significant number of men perceive anything from pink to orange to purple as "red". And I am not speaking about the colour blind...


It's called tetrachromacy. Many women have it. Actually, only women have it. Essentially you have one extra color receptor than the standard 3. There are tests for tetrochromacy, but RGB values of monitors and CMYK printing standards are unable to produce it, so typically you have to get one specially made.

And fun fact, its usually the red and orange colors that tetrochromatic women see as having a vast array of other colors within. You are possibly tetrochromatic and notice these colors, and are actually in the minority of women who see these.

No male will ever see this.


Tetrachromacy is quite rare, and almost certainly not what she's talking about. It's a fun topic, but let's not put words in each other's mouths.

Red, pink, and purple are quite distinguishable even for red-green colorblind people, and certainly do not require tetrachromacy to distinguish.

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jeff_lindqvist
Diglot
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SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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 Message 11 of 17
03 June 2010 at 8:53pm | IP Logged 
See also this thread:
Languages, words for colours blue and green
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Hashimi
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Oman
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 Message 12 of 17
03 June 2010 at 9:35pm | IP Logged 

Thank you jeff_lindqvist for the link, I don't know how I missed it.


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Hashimi
Senior Member
Oman
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 Message 13 of 17
03 June 2010 at 9:42pm | IP Logged 

ManicGenius wrote:
Personally, I just think that English people got bored and started
making up random names for slight variation in color.

Seriously. Chartreuse? WTF?


Which Chartreuse do you mean?


and what about School bus
yellow
, Jazzberry
jam
, or Still de grain?



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ManicGenius
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5492 days ago

288 posts - 420 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Esperanto, French, Japanese

 
 Message 14 of 17
03 June 2010 at 10:13pm | IP Logged 
Hashimi wrote:

ManicGenius wrote:
Personally, I just think that English people got bored and started
making up random names for slight variation in color.

Seriously. Chartreuse? WTF?


Which Chartreuse do you mean?


and what about School bus
yellow
, Jazzberry
jam
, or Still de grain?




I just don't like annoying names for colors. Mauve, okre and other similar things.
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Lucky Charms
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lapacifica.net
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 Message 15 of 17
04 June 2010 at 2:11am | IP Logged 
In a university anthropology class, we studied the spectrums encompassed in color names in different cultures. I did my report on Vietnamese, and found not only that green/blue are considered shades of the same color, but that a wide range of colors from yellow to orange to pink can all be called 'cam'.

I remember reading a fascinating study in that class. It seems that there is a kind of cross-cultural 'hierarchy of color names' if you will. For example, a few cultures only specify two colors - 'light' and 'dark'. Everything in these cultures is considered a shade of black or white. If a culture distinguishes a third color after that, it will almost definitely be red. If they distinguish a fourth color, it will be green. So we read about a culture in which every color is described as a shade of black, white, red, or green. I forget the order after that, but the distinction between blue and green was a very high-level distinction which many cultures do not make.

This quite old study also, attempted to make a correlation between how many color distinctions a culture makes and how 'primitive' or 'indistrialized' the society is. Needless to say, his conclusions here have been widely criticized, not least because the author's native English (which he listed along with other Western European languages as one of the most industrialized) did not make the blue-green and other distinctions before borrowing color words from French.

EDIT: I tried to find the study online, and it may have been this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Univer sality_and_Evolution

Edited by Lucky Charms on 04 June 2010 at 2:21am

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Raincrowlee
Tetraglot
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 Message 16 of 17
04 June 2010 at 5:31am | IP Logged 
Derian wrote:
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
At the risk of offending every single male on the forum, I feel tempted to point out, that a significant number of men perceive anything from pink to orange to purple as "red".

No, we don't perceive it all as red. We call it all red - out of convenience, because to differentiate between them is quite redundant :)


No, there seems to be some perceptual problems. My father has a difficult time distinguishing between shades of colors, sometimes shades that are quite dissimilar. He's not colorblind, just color insensitive. Though I don't think his case is quite as extreme as what Solfrid mentioned.


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