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comment by Pribnow
Pribnow  ·  3617 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: If We Have No Word for a Colour, Can We See It? Researchers Say No.

Ancient Sumerians used lapis lazuli rather often and ancient Greek mosaics used blue tiles consistently (in that they don't use blue and green interchangeably, they don't mix blue and other colors for which they lacked distinct terminology).

I think the difference in terminology just has to do with different systems of categorizing the same colors. Here's a good paper that responds specifically to the Himba experiment and that I think is on the right track:

http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schuh/lx001/Discussion/d01_Himba_color_perception_critique.pdf

As far as the green squares go, I successfully identified the tile that is a different shade but I certainly don't have a separate word to describe that square. I can't even come up with a good way to distinguish it from the other squares using words. It just looks slightly different.





istara  ·  3614 days ago  ·  link  ·  

To me it was a slightly yellowish green. But I suspect monitor settings make a huge amount of difference.

In frequency terms, was the yellow-green as different from the green-green as the blue square was from the green-green?

davidbriggs  ·  3615 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks for the link to the critique of the Himba experiments! As this recent discussion points out, the experiments to date have still not been published in any form: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970

Pribnow  ·  3615 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I noticed that when I was trying to find them myself. Not very confidence inspiring

bioemerl  ·  3617 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I swear, I look at that image and the green squares are changing shades as I look at them.