1203: Color-Groupings across Languages (Color Week: 4) Mar 26, 2018

Though language is one of the best ways we have to communicate, because people cannot convey an entire thought-process ever, there is always some ambiguity of the meaning of signs (words). Many—thousands if not more—shades exist that could be denoted with a basic color categories [2], so for instance, a scarlet may be different from a tan red and both are different to fire-engine red, but all could still generally be called ‘red’. One could ask then: how do people know what to assign ‘red’ to?—and more importantly for our purposes—will this differ from language-to-language?
To answer the first question (without getting into biology, neurology, or much childhood’s language-acquisition), the answer is that assuming, controversially, that people can all see the same way regardless of language, people only have to get used to grouping different shades from trial-and-error when learning language from infancy. The second question is more simple answered: yes. Statistically, for example, the range of what a French ‘verde’ (‘green’) conveys is different to the range of colors understood by English’s ‘green’. People are not limited or enhanced by speaking French in this case, so much as translations are not exactly 1-to-1, simply due to cultural norms.