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| Colours the same: for the exact same spot on the spectrum, some people see green others blue, even if they are same mother tongue speakers and same age. People asked to circle the surface typical for a colour, the result are stunning: not everybody have the same perception of frontiere between colours (especially green/blue and yellow/orange, others are clearer). Complex...
Linguistics teaches you so much... how do you live without? | |
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Indeed. And between different languages there isn't always an exact correspondence between the definition of colours.
An example: in old Irish grass is defined by the same colour used for the ocean,
gorm, a colour usually interpreted as blue.. but that as this example shows, can also encompass in its range green, and even grey! Maybe similar to the colour defined in ancient Greek as
glaucos (γλαυκος).
Latin by contrast had many different terms for shades of colours we don't normally bother to distinguish so specifically, such as:
flavus (gold yellow),
gilvus (pale yellow),
fulvus (like ginger hair, or a red fox),
luteus (yellow verging to orange), just to mention the yellows only.
And in Danish, pink is simply
lyserød, i.e. "pale red".