Talk:Color term

Japanese

For example, a kind of sea green, called aoi in Japanese, in English is generally regarded as a shade of green, while in Japanese what an English speaker would identify as "green" can be regarded as a different shade of the kind of sea green.

I think this is a bit mixed up. Aoi is simply the Japanese word for blue, not specifically sea green. Japanese tend to regard the colour green as a shade of blue rather than a major colour, as in English. For example Japanese refer to the green colour in a traffic light as blue. FWIW Japanese do have a word for green, midori.

Orange in Spanish

A friend of mine lived in Barcelona for a while, and noticed that whenever Spanish people talk about the color orange, they refer to a color that we scandinavians would consider to be "yellow-orange". I wonder if there is any research on this somewhere? JoaCHIP (talk) 18:43, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

Illustration

Ironic that this has no color swatches for illustration, but not sure what would be desirable. Stan 21:38, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Copyrighted colors?

Do they exist? What about paints? Goblin Green. And things like that... do they have real names, or other names?

I'm no copyright expert, but I expect it will be like food. You can not copyright a food or a recipe, but you can copyright the name, if it is unique, specific, etc. In Kentucky (US) there is a famous recipe for Derby Pie. Only the copyright holder can make it (commercially) and call it "Derby Pie", but many restaurants make the exact same recipe and call it "Horserace Pie", "Twin Spires Pie", etc. Crayola may be able to copyright "Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown", but I dont think they could copyright #C45655 (the color itself). Many paint companies copyright certain color names, and especially names of clolor "lines", but not the color themselves. Stephenlegh (talk) 15:23, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

red

why is red almost always the third color term? is it because human blood is red? 71.248.115.187 15:47, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Humans are hardwired with an opponent mechanism for color perception; in simplistic terms: black vs white; red vs green; yellow vs blue. Berlin and Kay did a study that found that the basic color terms in all the languages they surveyed include these six colors. It is unlikely that "blood red" has anything to do with it. --Walter.bender 23:23, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Sergej N. Yendrikhovskij "Computing color categories" in Proc. of SPIE Vol. 3959 pp.365-364 argues that if you look at a random set of pictures of natural objects and perform a k-means clustering with k=3 for all appearing colors you will find the best matches are white,black and red/reddish. Or other words, if you are allowed to use only three color words, this three words are the best match you can get to describe and communicate the natural colors. 99.140.250.222 (talk) 14:49, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

color science is not the same as color perception

"Color is determined by a physical color and/or other physical features, such as reflection or iridescence." Color is a psychophysical, not a physical phenomenon. Here is a simple example: a black stimulus in sunlight typical reflects more light than a white stimulus in room light. Color Science is about measuring electromagnetic radiation. Color Vision is about how the eye/mind turn radiations, plural, into the perception of color. --Walter.bender 23:18, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Color names by language

I'd like to propose a new section on Color spectrum by langauge. It would include a reference to Distinguishing blue from green in language. I have also observed that it is common in some languages, such as German to distinguish between the colors of pink and rose (color), whereas it is not common to do so in English. samwaltz 23:03, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

English 11-color system vs. the 12-color systems used in other languages.

In the seventh paragraph of the section headed "In natural languages," the statement is made that "English has the eleven basic color terms listed above." The eleven basic English color terms, however, are never explicitly stated. If you count up the list of colors as they evolve linguistically given in paragraph six, you can infer that the eleven basic colors in the English language are black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple and gray. I'll clarify that sentence explicitly listing these colors (assuming it is correct).

However, in doing so, it seems strange that the description of linguistic color-name evolution in paragraph six stops at those eleven colors before going on to discuss theories of how language influences perception or vice-versa. I'm given to understand that some languages (such as Greek and Russian, perhaps?) contain twelve basic color names, distinguishing (I think) between dark blue and light blue. If this is a universal case among languages with twelve-color systems, then a sentence should be added in paragraph six mentioning this before diverging into the discussion about perception.

For that matter, it might make sense to take the perception discussion out of graf six altogether, and give it its own subsection; it's an interesting topic and seems a bit buried where it is. Rangergordon (talk) 03:39, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Color term vs name

I've undone the move of this page. As I understand it, color term fits better for words describing the properties of a color like hue, shade, tint, saturation, intensity, etc. while color name is name of a particular group of colors, e.g. blue, green, teal, etc. PaleAqua (talk)

color term is the term used in linguistic anthropology. A color term is simply a linguistic element that refers to a color concept. This is what the article seems to be about mostly. The article probably uses name because the person who created the page didnt know that color term is the usual word used to refer to them.

On a somewhat more tangential note, several langs do not have color terms that are nouns (verbs and adjectives are common). So, the definition is incorrect. – ishwar  (speak) 04:08, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

I agree that often color words are not nouns, but most of my sources differ on what they call them collectively. For example Ian Paterson's lexican "A Dictionary of Colour" refers to them as colourwords, colour nouns and adjectives of colour. Depending on the source, and it's field I seem to see a bit of variety in the terms. The Encyclopædia Britannica apparently uses colour-term as does http://phrontistery.info/colours.html. And the first source cited "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution" also uses color term. I think you pretty much have me agreeing with you, especially since this article is mostly focused on the linguistic side. PaleAqua (talk) 06:56, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

compound color names in English

When a color name is hyphenated (e.g. “green-blue”) is the predominant color the first word or the second word? For example, does “orange-yellow” refer to a golden yellow color or to a yellowish-orange color? Bwrs (talk) 01:15, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Anthropology of color

While doing some reading I happened across some exerts from Anthropology of color: interdisciplinary multilevel modeling. ISBN 9789027232434., looks like it might be an interesting resource for this article. Anyone seen/have this book? PaleAqua (talk) 08:48, 5 December 2009 (UTC)