this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Not quite. The number of colours itself is language-dependent. Easier shown with an example:
The three gems in the pic are emerald, turquoisite and lapis respectively. How many colours are there?
From Russian PoV, English is the one using "one word for two colours", and Japanese used one for three.
...or at least that's how Japanese did it. The primary colours of a language can change over time - splitting, migrating, or even merging (in rare situations). And that's exactly what happened with Japanese, with 緑 midori changing meaning from "verdure" to "a hue of 青 ao", and then telling the later "GET OFF MY LAWN, I'M NOW A PRIMARY COLOUR!".
For reference, English did the same around the XVI century, with a shade of yellow (more specifically yellow-red). It's now called "orange".
I mean, you really should have words for at least 6 distinct colours, those being red, yellow, blue, green, orange and purple.
Additional words for stuff like brown may be left out, but those six colours should be named.
Even if those six were the actual primary and secondary colours, it wouldn't be necessary to have a primary word for each. You can refer them by hue, or by referring to some object.
Also, note that the "true" colour wheel (based on our light reception) is more like red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta. (No orange; and purple is kind of far from magenta.) The wheel that you're implying by those six colours is mostly an artistic "distortion" of the 18th century. And yet it isn't cross-linguistically common to take cyan or magenta as "named" colours, they're often seen as hues of blue/green and red/rose/purple respectively.
(Some societies live just fine with three colours - "dark", "light", and "red".)
But you don't - that's why languages lacking these words run into issues as described in the article.
But isn't there a good reason it was distorted that way?
Of course some colours take up much more or much less of the visible colour spectrum, but that doesn't mean they have more significance to us.
Like red taking up over five times more of the colour spectrum than yellow doesn't mean that all these reds need to be named. Most red tones are hardly distinguishable to most people. Yellow and red on the other hand can be distinguished with ease.
You won't run into the issue of differently coloured traffic lights in english countries; because while the traffic lights might use slightly different shades of green, they don't use drastically different colours - because we properly named them.
People do it fairly often. Specially when precision is needed. Vermilion red, ultramarine blue, so goes on.
The issue is not lacking a word, but mismatching usage - in this case, between Japanese as used by the speakers versus the legislation. It wouldn't happen if the speakers kept using 青/ao for emerald-coloured stuff - they'd look at the emerald-coloured go light, say "it's ao!", legislation agrees, all is well.
And it is certainly not directly the result of a lack of words for those six arbitrarily specific tones, as this example shows:
The soil in the picture is called "terra roxa" in Portuguese. It means "purple soil" (red soil would be "terra vermelha"). It's the exact same underlying issue as in Japanese - you call it by one name, and yet the underlying colour is another.
And, while there are potential three reasons why it might be called this way (old Spanish explorers, Portuguese internal change, Italian colonists), all of them involve some mapping mismatch:
And yet in no relevant moment the language lacked a distinction between red and purple. On the contrary - it has three words for that range. ("Púrpura" is nowadays mostly a fancy synonymous for "roxo", but based on Galician usage odds are that all three were distinct at some point; for reference modern Hungarian does it too).
That's mostly appeal to ignorance - "we don't know, so it's caused by this".
That distorted colour wheel is likely the result of the access to pigments and traditional usage back then, and lack of access to knowledge on how our eyes process light.
Also note two things:
A "country" speaks no language. That is not just nitpicking - the issue is a mismatch between the language as used by the population vs. the legislation.
And yes, this issue could happen if English remapped the colour used to refer to green, through some semantic shift.
You just made me realise i dont know what indigo is
It's a plant.