1204: Non-Basic Color Categories (Color Week: 5) Mar 27, 2018

Following from yesterday's post about the somewhat arbitrary nature of confirming what hues go along with what basic color categories, it might also lead to the question of why a language would have a term for a red—or any other color—at all. This is not to say that it should be strange that languages develop words for this, but that peoples will associate certain groupings of shades and hues to the same few colors in the first place, across cultures (more or less). Of course, there are also color terms outside of the basic color categories, such as English's 'vermillion', 'scarlet', and 'magenta', but these are not the most general. Indeed, consider being in a paint store where it is possible to see squares with thousands of different colors with all sorts of names such as Benjamin Moore's "Magic Potion" (a sort of violet). However, 'Magic Potion', and moreover even the umbrella term 'violet' can both exist under the umbrella of 'purple'. Indeed, even if someone saw—for physiological reasons—Magic Potion as something more like the similar 'Mauve Desert' (also available from Benjamin Moore) they could both be lumped under 'purple'. No one knows exactly how other's will interpret colors visually, so language has to approximate and generalize, and not every individual's nor every languages color will be identical, even if it translates as something usually the same.
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