Color categories

One of the most intriguing examples of folk categories is the colors that different language languages recognize.

We all know that there is a very wide range of colors in nature. If you ever tried to decide what color to paint your house and have pored over dozens of color charts at the paint store, you know how many variations of the same color there can be.

We can look at ten different shades of green, and even though we can see that there are different, we still call them all “green”, thus lumping them into the same category.

An interesting experiment is to take finely graded color samples (such as those in a custom-mixed paint color chart) ranging from green to blue, including perhaps 20 to 30 shades.

If you look at both extremes, you can easily say that one is green and the other one is blue.

The hard part is drawing the line between one shade and another, saying that one belongs to the category “green” and the other to the category “blue”.

In fact sometimes we get around this problem by inventing another category, “blue green”.

In our language the category “blue-green” is really not a separate category but merely a convenient label for the transition between two categories.

We know this because we do not have a separate word for it. This indicates to us that, while blue and green are significant, the transition form one to the other is less so.

But in the other language there could easily be a word that designates “blue-green” as a separate category.

Certainly there is no reason why this could not be done – after all, isn’t green a transition between blue and yellow?
Color categories