Comment by soulofmischief
2 years ago
I got hue 175. It's interesting to note that some older cultures, Japan for example, didn't always have separate words for blue and green, both were the same color ("ao" in Japanese). You can see the effects of this even today with things like traffic lights in Japan, which are considered "green" by their standards but blue by many others' standards.
There are also other cultures, such as Russia, where light blue / dark blue (simplification) are effectively considered separate colors.
All this to say, personally, I think we will continue to evolve to recognize more distinct "colors" such as teal, which is neither blue nor green but somewhere between. A lot of this recognition power is rooted in linguistics and culture, it's not as strictly biological as one might think.
Thanks for this comment! I dabble in fountain pens a bit, and one of my favorite inks is "ao" by Taccia.
Now it all makes sense (tho, to my eye it's kind of a blurple–royal blue; I get no green or teal from it. But, now I'm tempted to go do a blotter of it and look at it extra carefully in natural light.)
In Russian light blue is “blue” and dark blue is “indigo” essentially. It still has seven colors in the rainbow. It’s just that in English colloquially nobody uses indigo.
Yes, well that's what I mean. Culturally, Russians think and speak about colors differently, dividing them up differently than the West.
> Russian does not have a single word referring to the whole range of colors denoted by the English term "blue". Instead, it traditionally treats light blue (голубой, goluboy) as a separate color independent from plain or dark blue (синий, siniy), with all seven "basic" colors of the spectrum (red–orange–yellow–green–голубой/goluboy (sky blue, light azure, but does not equal cyan)–синий/siniy ("true" deep blue, like synthetic ultramarine)–violet) while in English the light blues like azure and cyan are considered mere shades of "blue" and not different colors.
> Blue: plava (indicates any blue) and modra; in the eastern speaking areas modra indicates dark blue, in some of the western areas it may indicate any blue
etc. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
I am not deeply knowledgeable on Russian, I failed Russian in high school, just going off of my surface-level knowledge of linguistic relativity regarding color, and discussions with a friend from that part of the world, so I might not know what I'm talking about here.
That’s a bit complicated. The difference between синий and голубой is not really a difference in hue, it’s a difference in brightness.
It tends to be true that hues tending towards green are perceived more brightly than hues tending towards red, which means that blues with more green in them are more likely to be голубой, but by virtue of the fact they are perceived to be brighter.
But in principle, the line is drawn horizontally on the colour chart (or at least diagonally), not vertically.