>English is close but we don't have separate words for blue and light blue.
Azure. Celeste. Cerulean. Cyan. Teal. Turqouise. aqua. Aquamarine. Lapis.
Azure. Celeste. Cerulean. Cyan. Teal. Turqouise. aqua. Aquamarine. Lapis.
Basic color terms need to be:
- monolexemic ("green", but not "light green" or "forest green"),
- high-frequency, and
- agreed upon by speakers of that language.[7]
All of those words you listed aren't high frequency.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms
For instance, what is high frequency?
And what if say blind speakers of the language disagree?
The 300 most frequent words in a representative corpus of text.
> And what if say blind speakers of the language disagree?
Blind speakers represent a small portion of all speakers, so even if every one of them disagrees, the majority of speakers will still agree.
That doesn't seem to be a very good definition. As we subdivide colors into greater specificity, it'll naturally occur that each subdivision is referenced fewer times. So this definition intrinsically precludes a discovery of finer distinctions.
IMHO, the whole idea that language shapes thought and perception (see TFA reference to Whorf) is overblown. I've seen this refuted where one person made the claim that while Nepalese(?) has a term for "mountain peak", English has no such word. The reply was: "of course it has a term for this: 'mountain peak'". As expert language users, we have no trouble synthesizing new concepts by using our language, which after all is far more than just a list of words, to frame our thoughts.
I once was sitting near an argument about whether an object was blue or purple, and they decided to drag me into the argument. Not wanting to take sides, I said "how about periwinkle?", and they both seemed satisfied with that answer.
That's true but their relative frequency will not change. Ie. if your only words are warm and cold you may see each of those 6% of the time, but if your have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple then you will see each one 2% of the time.
But in both cases all the other color related words in the language would be significantly less than 2%.
The big 11:
red 12,110,000,000
orange 7,040,000,000
yellow 6,370,000,000
green 13,850,000,000
blue 15,100,000,000
purple 10,160,000,000
black 13,390,000,000
white 12,330,000,000
gray 14,950,000,000
brown 10,160,000,000
pink 4,700,000,000
... and some test cases
maroon 152,000,000
teal 7,320,000,000
navy 870,000,000
cyan 110,000,000
I think the frequency explanation has trouble, since "teal" has more hits than "orange", "yellow", and (by a lot) "pink".
Usually you remove proper nouns when doing a word frequency analysis.
Pink, Maroon and Navy are all proper nouns -- Singer/songwriter, band (Maroon 5), and branch of the military.
Also, a Google search only gets you documents that have that word at least once, but removes duplicates. So maybe the page with red has it listed 7,000 times but you wouldn't know.
Trying using all the text in Project Gutenberg[0], removing the proper nouns, and then run the analysis again.
Linguists have done this for you already -- and the results were that your top list are in the top 300 and the bottom are not.
https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
This isn't just a comic - Randall Munroe ran a color naming survey on internet users. Native language was not collected. I assume native English speakers were over-represented but not universal.
Interestingly there was a slight gender difference in naming among respondents (see the second table). Is that perceptual or a cultural gender-specific difference in how often men or women talk about color?
It's perceptual. Women have a higher cone to rod ratio, making them see colors easier while men see movement better. Also women are more likely to be tetracromats (four different cones instead of three).
There are some unproven evolutionary reasons that this may be the case -- men needed better movement detection to hunt while women needed better color vision to detect bad food when gathering.
There are some anecdotes that colourblind sharpshooters find it easier to see through camouflage as they're more sensitive to shapes (i.e. because for them a lot of things are "naturally camouflaged" they have more experience detecting shapes) but I'm not sure how factual they are.
I'd say the 1 in 12 vs 1 in 200 difference alone might account for a significant difference when looking at a uniform sample of both sexes.
http://www.sherwin-williams.com/homeowners/color/find-and-ex...