Re:Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language (2015)
by int_19h on Monday October 17, 2016 @04:09PM
(#12729163)
The point is that in English, there's still a common word for, say, both "scarlet" and "crimson", grouping them together. But there's no such common word between "red" and "green" - the latter are primary colors, always distinguished.
In other languages, that grouping is done differently, and two colors that would both be appropriate to call "red" in English don't have a single common color term at all.
To get a feel of how this looks from the other side, consider various Asian languages that don't distinguish green and blue, and have a single word that has to be translated as "green or blue" to English.
Re:Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language (2015)
by mjlee on Monday October 17, 2016 @03:06PM
(#12728210)
That's not what they said at all. The example of red wine vs a bright red robe is a very valid one. You might become more specific when tasked with artistically describing the colour of a wine, but off the cuff you'd probably just use the word "red" for wine, blood (oxygenated or not), ink and sunsets in a way that wouldn't work in Hungarian.
They don't. "Red" doesn't exist as a concept except abstractly. Words like "scarlet" and "teal" have been used since middle English to describe colors.
In other words: it's not that English works the way he described (it doesn't), but instead the inverse: Hungarian doesn't have an equivalent for "red".