This approach is rooted in the theory that language is not “representative” of the world, but significantly constitutive of it. In this view, language is not something that mechanically “points to” things, but is the system through which consciousness develops and allows us to reason about sense-impressions in a way that is uniquely human (or at least sapient). Pragmatically, sense-impressions are organized into “things we can talk about” and, having named them, we now use those names and concepts to organize the world we perceive. The flip side is that we’re less likely to develop new names for and new reason-abouts things if they comfortably fit within our existing nominal categories, unless we have good practical reason to do so. Thus a visual designer will have a great many names for gradations in color that a non-designer might not be able to reason about (“It’s all just blue, right?”), because he or she has a practical need to distinguish colors and think about them at a much finer level of granularity. This also has the interesting derivation that societies can only reason about what they can talk about, which has profound implications for how inter-group communicative discourse works — from politics to intra-corporate coordination to literature. If you’re interested in this, I’d recommend any synoptic overview of Pragmatic and New Pragmatic thought, and the linguistic work of Searle.

I'd say it should be rephrased as "could only name a color as categorically distinct from others" to make it more obvious. If you're asked if something is blue or red, then turquoise would definitely be described as blue, but green also. It's not that you wouldn't see the difference between sky and grass, it's just that you'd classify it all as a different shades of the same color, as it's closer to it than to say red. On the other hand yellow would probably be a shade of light red in that example. Once you're used to that palette you'd start simply ignoring the differences in shade for practical usages, like for instance Cambridge Blue is called blue, while to me it's really green.

Well I mean, obviously you can't "name a color as distinct" if your language doesn't have a distinct name for it. That doesn't mean it's perceptually indistinguishable.

I'm not sure why this tautology is regarded as such a big deal.

It seems obvious, but could have profound consequences on how you logically group things together. Most of us thinks verbally and if it has no distinct name you don't think of it as a distinct entity, so our perception would just box it with all other shades. You don't go around thinking this spot of grass is so Chartreuse green, and that over there is more Shamrock green - it's all one entity for you, "the green stuff". Now, of course, unless we talk about the color of skin, how you group colors probably doesn't create a huge practical differences for us now, but it has certainly influenced our perception of the world.

It's basically the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has long since been disproven, but the soft version is still kicking because it's much harder to disprove and part of it is necessarily true (but I think it's mostly tautological).

Don't know if that's in the article, sorry if I'm just repeating stuff.

Even if you don’t have a different word for green and blue, one could certainly express the idea of a blue that is like a leaf rather than the sky.

You’d assume so, but this is in fact false. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_la...

That doesn't really support your contention. The color naming debate underlying the entire discussion is primarily focused on basic color terminology, for which colors that are merely allusions to a physical object (e.g., turquoise, gold, lavender) are excluded. But that doesn't tell you what terminology people will actually reach for in description. Japanese, for example, uses "ao" to refer to essentially the entire blue/green spectrum, but "midori" (lit. "leaf") is used to green, increasingly to the exclusion of "ao" in modern Japanese (side note: this is literally an example, explicitly mentioned in your reference, of what the GP is suggesting happens).

As far as I can tell all that articles says is that there are languages that use a single term for green/blue, not that speakers of those languages are incapable of identifying the difference between the colour of a leaf and the color of the sky. I can distinguish between the colour of the sky and the colour of blueberries (and treat them as categories of colours) even if I use the same word "blue" for both.

The article is to a large extent about cause and effect, that the basic assumption is that the cause may be linguistic is odd to me.

It makes sense to me. It matches my experience. I can't think of examples, sorry, but I do know there have been times I've learnt new categories by words (and of course an explanation of where they differed; the semantics of the words), suddenly distinctions became obvious that weren't before.

I wish I could recall examples, so this is just a vague statement of 'in my experience' but that linguistic distinction creates categories that allow easier 'recognition' of different concepts I'd lumped together before.

I think that a relevant example here would be categorizing "red" and " green" to a colour blind person.

I don't think so, as that categorisation can't be perceived by them. Like, they can't see it.

I'm saying that once 2 categories had been conceptually distinguished, I could split them apart immediately because the difference had been explain, whereas they were amorphously lumped together in my head before. Typically those categories had different words, but even without that the distinction became evident.

It's besides the point, but that's actually not how typical red-green colorblindness works.

We can see both red and green as separate colors, it's just much harder to distinguish them than it is for other people (especially if they are mixed in with other colors).

As far as I understand the physiology, our eyes are much less sensitive to green light, so it just doesn't stand out as much.

Very much on point, and I learned something. Ta.

How could it be something other than linguistic? Do you think it's genetic?

Well, biological.

You're suggesting koreans may be biologically different enough that they see more shades of green than everyone else?

Perception is trained, whether visual, auditory, etc. It's true that people who live next to the sea/ocean are trained to differentiate shades of blue and green much more than people who live in woody areas — shades of greens and yellows become much more sophisticated in such cases. Musicians tends to isolate sounds and timbers better (e.g. with a noisy background, or identifying precise instruments and effects in complex multi-instrumental pieces).

Painters are typically a bunch of good examples of our very subjective color perception.

So, language develops due to the environment it is in, which also affects people's perception? That still doesn't sound biological

human biology adapts to the environment and forms the basic primitive culture. technology for over 10,000 years rapidly mixed cultures and to a lesser extent biologies forming: languages, empires, religions, and ages. the technological process is far more efficient at shaping our cognition than the slower evolutionary one which works through intergenerational selection events. this is a cumulative runaway event which makes sense- given that human intellect is probably a bad mutation for long term fitness and survival, as humans wiped out all of the other humanlike species (and dangerous megafauna) which might have kept us in some ecological niche like the other animals. all living things head towards extinction, but our strategy is to burn up rather than fade away.

Language has nothing to do with biology except in the purest form of it resulting in different meat shapes in your brain. As far as I'm aware, there is absolutely 0 evidence that language can be inherited - anecdotally at least because both my parents can speak French and I can't.

specific languages are the result of history and territory. Language is an innate human capacity. the speed, breadth and depth of acquisition is measured relative to other humans. less methodical than athletics, art, music or mathematics- which are easier to measure. but definitely not as nebulous as influence, attraction, art or leadership- which are just now becoming measurable with proto artificial brains.