Are Blue and Green Different?

Are blue and green one color?

Google search result of blue

Google search result for green.

Google search result for the color ao in Classical Japanese.

“Language changes the way we perceive colors. ”

You probably say no, if you are an English speaker or a student in an English speaking country. Blue, green, and all the colors in between are together on the color spectrum. They are all formed from short wave of light. Yet, it is very common in many languages to use a single word to denote both blue and green. The blue-green continuum is mostly collectively named and context-specific.

Language changes the way we perceive colors.

In pre-modern Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Egyptian, Classical Chinese and many other languages, the word to mean the color blue also means bluish green and green. The meaning depends on the referential context. For instance, in Classical Chinese there are two words (qing and bi) that both can describe the color of sky, of water, and of grass. In Classical Japanese, for another instance, the word to denote blue (ao) is interchangeable with the term to denote green and cyan. However, modern Chinese and Japanese do distinguish between blue and green. It is speculated that globalization and especially the influence of English and products from the English-speaking cultures triggered the movement in many modern vernaculars to use distinct words to denote blue and green.

Languages that historically used one word to denote green and blue are context-specific in their use of the word. Classical Chinese word qing used to be the name of verdant plants, but it can commonly denote a wide range of colors from green to blue to dark blue and even black, depending on the word it combines with. The word is usually used in a two-word combination. Although modern vernacular Chinese uses another word for green, qing cai (qing + vegetable) is still the popular name of bok choy, while qun qing means the color or dye ultramarine.

However, it doesn’t mean that the ancient people speaking certain languages are unable to perceive the difference between the two colors. According to the Berlin and Kay Theory of cross-cultural color concepts, it is not that these languages fail to distinguish green from blue, but that they consider green and blue as two or more shades of one color. In Egyptian, the word dark blue is distinct from the word light blue, which is used to denote turquoise. Many Slavic languages that contain two terms, light blue and dark blue, is another instance. A color concept is monolexemic if it is denoted by one single word (Hardin, 2013), but there are just so many single words in stock. Once a color concept is denoted by two words, one of the words is an intensifier (Warburton, 2014) and the word it describes is a main word. The main word forms a mental image for people as a basic color category.

“Perception is a spectrum, but naming is categorical.”

Our perception and understanding of the world are mediated by the language we speak. As I introduced in the second article on Funes, the naming system both reflects and directs the level of specificity in the organization of knowledge. Language is the architecture of epistemology. The rainbow in anglicized cultures is represented by 7 colors, but in Slavic language-dominated areas, it has 12 (Hardin, 2013).

Colors in Russian, source: MasterRussian.com

If you are wondering why some cultures do not have separate single terms for blue and green, try to first question yourself, why is this color below described by two words (bluish green) instead of a unique monolexemic name? If you think it is unnamable because it is the intermediary, maybe for ancient people of certain languages, green is also the intermediary between yellow and blue. Perception is a spectrum, but naming is categorical.

With RGB values in between blue and green, this color is known by “teal” which is not a basic color category.

Categorization of colors works differently across cultures prior to globalization and seeps into the back of mind as a person goes through socialization. In the earliest stage of life, a child is likely exposed to crayons of a limited number of colors, rainbow stickers, and Lego bricks. Then she perceives colors from those things; from her parents’ mouth she learns the words for the colors. Colors may be artificially constructed. It is because our world is so globalized and assimilated that nowadays most modern people do not see the gap between green and blue as optional.

Crayons for children usually display four colors.

Toys for children make them learn colors.

Every language can express every color, but each language categorizes them differently, and only distinguish them using referential phrases or descriptive intensifiers.

Every concept can be expressed by every language, but every language mediates the concepts differently and certain languages are more ready to express some concepts than others.

References:

Bhatia, Aatish. "The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains (part I)". June 5, 2012.  Empirical Zeal. Retrieved July 12, 2018.

Hardin, C.l. “Berlin and Kay Theory.” Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology, 2013, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8_62-2.

Warburton, David Alan. “Ancient Color Categories.” Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology, 2014, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8_75-12.