{"id":1283,"date":"2018-07-03T15:05:53","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T15:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/?p=1283"},"modified":"2022-01-15T22:51:44","modified_gmt":"2022-01-15T22:51:44","slug":"colour-names-different-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/zh-hans\/colour-names-different-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"Colour Names in Languages Can be Different!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t you think the colour of carrot is orange from eye to eye? Cucumbers are all green instead of blue?<\/p>\n

Believe it or not, colour names can be different in various languages.<\/p>\n

Numbers of basic colour categories<\/h3>\n

In English, there are 11 basic colour categories* (red, orange, brown, yellow, green, blue,  purple, pink, black, gray, and white). But in Russian and Greek, they have 13 with dark blue and light blue treated as basic categories which is no where to be found in English world.<\/p>\n

In sharp contrast, the language of ethnic groups in Papua New Guinea, And Dani languages, only differentiate colours into cool and warm colours (cool\/dark [blue, green, and black], and warm\/light [red, yellow, and white].<\/p>\n

There are also languages which has 3 basic colour categories (black, white and red).<\/p>\n

\u201cBlue and Green are the same colour!\u201d<\/h3>\n

We all know that green would only be green when we are mixing yellow and blue. Right? In fact, in the world of languages, it can be not the case!<\/p>\n

In fact, there are languages which don\u2019t distinguish blue and green.<\/p>\n

Languages like Shelha and Ancient Japanese do not distinguish blue and green as basic colour categories, instead they use a cover term spanning both (\u201cAzegzaw<\/em>\u201d for Shelha, and \u201cAo<\/em> \u9752\u201d for Japanese).<\/p>\n

Meet your language\u2019s colour culture<\/h3>\n

The number of  <\/strong>basic colour categories your language has determines your colour culture! When you see a colour that is not included in your language\u2019s basic colour category, you would tend to describe with the colour similar to it. Such as Shelha, which they do not have a specific term distinguish blue and green, they can\u2019t tell the different like other language user could.<\/p>\n

Same colour, different names!\"orange-cat-brown-cat\"<\/a><\/h3>\n

English and Japanese basically have the same basic colour categories. So, they colours should be correspond, but it\u2019s not the case in daily life.<\/p>\n

For example, when these two languages speakers saw the same cats, English speaker would say it is an orange cat while Japanese speaker would say it is brown. As a native Japanese speaker, arguing with foreigners that the colour we saw together is pink or purple is part of my daily routine.<\/p>\n

But why is this happening? The secret behind is the border of colours between languages<\/p>\n

Next time don\u2019t be surprised when you and your foreign friend saw the same colour but answer different colour names!<\/p>\n

If you want to know more about colour names in foreign languages, check our app LingoCards<\/a> and check it out!<\/p>\n

*Terms of basic colour <\/em>
\nMonolexemic (*lemon-coloured, *blue-green)<\/em>
\nTheir extensions aren\u2019t included within those of any other colour terms (*crimson: red, *scarlet: red)<\/em>
\nApplications must not be restricted to a narrow class of objects (*blond: humans)<\/em>
\npsychologically salient for informants (*crimson, *scarlet, *bluish, …)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Don\u2019t you think the colou…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3581,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[425,426,3],"tags":[317,37,125],"class_list":["post-1283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-different-language-similarity-comparison","category-in-other-different-languages","category-language-interesting-facts-fun-reading","tag-comparison","tag-culture","tag-fun-facts","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/zh-hans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/zh-hans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/zh-hans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/zh-hans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/zh-hans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1283"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/zh-hans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7499,"href":"https:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/zh-hans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283\/revisions\/7499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/zh-hans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/zh-hans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/zh-hans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/zh-hans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}