colors are easy right they're one of the first things you learn as a kid red orange yellow green blue purple white black gray brown pink and then when you learn other languages all you have to do is learn the new words for the same colors except it's not actually the way it works that English Color system with its nicely defined names doesn't map onto every other language quick heads up I am massively simplifying here check the references if you want to know more details the most common difference or at least the most commonly studded difference
is whether blue and green are different colors or different shades of the same color one which English linguists refer to as grw Vietnamese for example use the same basic word or lexine for blue and green they can literally be translated as leaf grw or ocean grew does that seem weird it shouldn't that's just a simple change in where you draw a line on the wheel of Hues the ancient Greeks on the other hand classified colors not by Hue but by lightness so they had one Lexi one main word for dark blue green and brown and
one word for Light blues Grays greens colors like that English uses one word blue for two very different colors but in Russian there are two different words for what we'd call dark blue and light blue and that really shouldn't seem strange to English speakers because that's exactly what we do with dark red and light red or as we call it pink in 1969 Brent Berlin and Paul K released a book that claimed to track the evolution of color in languages according to Berlin and K languages start out with just words for dark cool colors and
light warm colors then gain a word for red then green and yellow then blue brown and the rest of what English refers to as the Spectrum there is some debate about how accurate that is and by some debate I mean this is a really controversial subject in linguistics and has been for decades I'm skimming over the very Basics here but there are reams of research going into some very deep claims that I'm not vaguely qualified to discuss lots of linguists with very impressive degrees have very strong and very different opinions on this cuz something as
apparently simple as color differences highlight just how tricky translation and cross-cultural communication can be but the debate goes a level deeper than that it's about whether the words we know and the languages we learn influence the way we interpret the world or whether they just reflect our existing interpretations and the answer is I don't know no one does really not yet the answer is probably somewhere in between because language is complicated people are complicated and sometimes things really aren't just black and white I really need to write better puns
