>Today in Western languages the same thing happens with blue and cyan. Italians will think of cyan (azure) as a colour while the French see it as a shade of blue, for example.

The same thing happens in Japanese. When I describe something that's light blue as "ao," I will invariably get a confused look and a "You mean mizuiro ('water color'), right?"

But to me, a native English speaker, it's still blue.

> yellow probably existed already as well then

Apparently Japanese traditionally only had the four - what the article calls "red" was used for any warm color, and "ao" covered any cool color.

Interestingly, the usage was pretty fluid. Now that I read up about it, it seems that "ao" was used for anything from pale gray all the way to dark purple overlapping with black. This survives curiously in some quasi-archaic usage - 青毛 (lit. "blue fur"), meaning a black horse, and 青馬 ("blue horse") for a pale gray or white horse.

I don't think the blue horse thing is an example of this, as it also exists in English to some degree.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brabanter.jpg

This horse is considered a "blue roan".

> I don't think the blue horse thing is an example of this

An example of what? Japanese "ao" referring to white or black horses is a direct holdover from ao's vague early usage, but that doesn't mean it's unique to Japanese.

I'd imagine the "blue roan" thing is due to "blue" having earlier meanings of gray or lead-colored, but a quick google didn't turn up any explanations about the horse specifically.

It occurs to me that this is analogous to accented letters in languages that use the “same” alphabet. For instance, in Spanish, “ñ” is a distinct letter; in English, it’s an accented version of “n”. The same applies to Swedish å/a, Polish ó/o, &c. That is, an accented letter is a “shade” in some languages and a distinct “colour” in others.

And the Germans don't know if ä is a separate letter or not :-)

IIRC a further complication in German is that the dots in ä/ö/ü started out as a small "e" on top of the letter, whereas the dots in most other Latin-based languages (e.g. in English ë) are mere accents. This is why the "expanded" versions of umlauts are still ae/oe/ue.

The alphabet I learned as a German child in the 1990s certainly didn't include the umlauts or eszett, nor did it acknowledge them as distinct letters. The alphabet had 26 letters, the umlauts were counted separately and the eszett was always the odd one out (often considered simply a special orthographic variant of the double-s).

So to that extent, the umlauts and eszett are definitely less "letter-like" than the Nordic å or ø which are proudly included in those countries' alphabets.

in Polish you have both ó and u, which are pronounced exactly the same, but words using them are inflected differently

> Italians will think of cyan (azure) as a colour while the French see it as a shade of blue, for example.

Same in Russian - синий and голубой are usually translated as "blue" and "light blue".

Weirdly, English doesn't seem to have any problem with red and pink; you'd almost expect it to use "red" and "light red".

As a German living in the US I'm sometimes uncertain how to properly distinguish between the German colors "rosa" and "pink". German "pink" is probably a little bit brighter than American "pink". The "rosa" is a very soft pink. The best translation for "rosa" is probably "rose-colored". However, it always feels off to me. In German "rosa" is a very common color whereas "rose-colored" is more of a comparison than a real color name. I mean even "periwinkle" has its own proper word. We don't call it "smurf-colored". It always makes me feel like I'm missing a very important color word. It's probably the only part of the English language that still makes me feel very uncertain and like I'm missing some fundamental word.

Edit: so I just had a discussion with my American wife about it and according to her "Rosa" is pink and German "pink" is hot pink. Now I think what might make this confusing to me might just be the different meanings of the same word "pink". Solved.

It sounds like you're describing magenta. It's a more saturated pink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magenta

> Weirdly, English doesn't seem to have any problem with red and pink; you'd almost expect it to use "red" and "light red".

I recall a throwaway joke in the Borderlands presequel, involving a particle effect a designer wants to be 'light red' but 'NOT PINK'. Which it turns out is a reference I didn't catch about from ye olde RvB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgi_YPxE5Kk

Pink is the name of a flowering plant. It was adopted as a color name the same as with orange.

When you have a continuum, most distinctions are to some extent arbitrary, and the simplest distinction scheme is the dichotomy.

This line of thought leads me to wonder just how fixed these categories are. Given two languages, each with two words for colors, such that one word in each language would be used for things we call red, and the other for things we call blue, do they agree on where the boundary lies?

There was an article I read a while ago on this subject that was pretty interesting:

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-w...

On that note about language there's this talk, which covers language's role in the blue/green distinction, phonemes with L/R, and persistent sense of cardinal directions:

http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/26/how-language-shapes...

There's quite a bit of interesting discussion of this sort of thing in Guy Deutscher's book "Through the language glass: Why the world looks different in other languages".

It's a great book, I can very much recommend it to anyone who is interested in languages!