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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

Well I mean, obviously you can't "name a color as distinct" if your language doesn't have a distinct name for it. That doesn't mean it's perceptually indistinguishable.

I'm not sure why this tautology is regarded as such a big deal.

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It seems obvious, but could have profound consequences on how you logically group things together. Most of us thinks verbally and if it has no distinct name you don't think of it as a distinct entity, so our perception would just box it with all other shades. You don't go around thinking this spot of grass is so Chartreuse green, and that over there is more Shamrock green - it's all one entity for you, "the green stuff". Now, of course, unless we talk about the color of skin, how you group colors probably doesn't create a huge practical differences for us now, but it has certainly influenced our perception of the world.

It's basically the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has long since been disproven, but the soft version is still kicking because it's much harder to disprove and part of it is necessarily true (but I think it's mostly tautological).

Don't know if that's in the article, sorry if I'm just repeating stuff.

Even if you don’t have a different word for green and blue, one could certainly express the idea of a blue that is like a leaf rather than the sky.

You’d assume so, but this is in fact false. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_la...

That doesn't really support your contention. The color naming debate underlying the entire discussion is primarily focused on basic color terminology, for which colors that are merely allusions to a physical object (e.g., turquoise, gold, lavender) are excluded. But that doesn't tell you what terminology people will actually reach for in description. Japanese, for example, uses "ao" to refer to essentially the entire blue/green spectrum, but "midori" (lit. "leaf") is used to green, increasingly to the exclusion of "ao" in modern Japanese (side note: this is literally an example, explicitly mentioned in your reference, of what the GP is suggesting happens).

As far as I can tell all that articles says is that there are languages that use a single term for green/blue, not that speakers of those languages are incapable of identifying the difference between the colour of a leaf and the color of the sky. I can distinguish between the colour of the sky and the colour of blueberries (and treat them as categories of colours) even if I use the same word "blue" for both.

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