I was actually talking with some friends about just this recently.
Particularly, I speak Russian as well as English. In Russian, we actually have two separate words for blue: one for light blue and one for dark blue. They are completely different colors. My idea was that this actually changes how Russians view colors as compared to English speakers. Good to see my idea has some scientific backing :).
I personally am in a particularly odd position: I learned Russian first but still learned English at a very young age (5) and have since used it more. I'm not entirely certain how this has affected my view of blue, but I think I see it more like English speakers (e.g. not differentiating between the two blues intuitively) than Russian speakers. This probably says something about my relative comfort in the two languages.
Another interesting thing is that for the longest time I did not even realize that the difference was so fundamental. I just took it in stride. When I thought about it, it was a little weird: there is actually a different set of colors (rather than just shades of color) in the two languages. The fact that I could go from one set to the other without noticing is rather interesting as well.
Japanese has something like that, too. See, Japanese didn't always make the blue-green distinction[1]. Because of this, certain items get described as 青い (aoi - green/blue) even though modern Japanese contains a word for green. So both clear blue skies and green traffic lights are still called 青い.
The article states that most world languages do not actually make a distinction between blue and green.
To me this seems completely foreign, which is an interesting insight on how much I take my language for granted. I can't even imagine thinking of blue and green as the same color, just like most Russians can't imagine thinking of синий and голубой as the same color (blue).
While I was brought up in a Russian family (we still speak Russian at home), I went to an English school from the first grade, so for me the difference between синий and голубой is much less ingrained than the difference between blue and green. I think this just shows that while Russian is my first language, English has really become dominant, for better or for worse.
There's an old study claiming there's actually some logic in how the distinctions progress:
"According to Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's 1969 study Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, distinct terms for brown, purple, pink, orange and grey will not emerge in a language until the language has made a distinction between green and blue. In their account of the development of color terms the first terms to emerge are those for white/black (or light/dark), red and green/yellow."
The results from the article -- that you are faster at recognizing across-category changes than within-category changes -- also hold for Russian speakers and the two blues. See:
Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M. C., Wu, L., Wade, A., & Boroditsky, L. (2007). The Russian blues: Effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 7780-7785.
Moreover, if you make people do a verbal task at the same time -- say, repeating a word aloud -- it makes this effect go away; but having people do a spatial task at the same time doesn't.
You are talking about goluboj (голубой) and sinij (синий). Interestingly, to me they are not completely different: goluboj has always been just like "light sinij", even though Russian has remained my only language for about 20 years.
In Hebrew they also have голубой-tcheleth, and синий-kahol; but the threshold is significantly closer to the lighter part, so there could be said to be no direct correlation between the words. It is so up there, I'd bet, they do actually think them different colors. Так вот.
> one for light blue and one for dark blue. They are completely different colors.
I initially thought you were referring to what we call "celeste" [1] in Spanish but after looking it up in the dictionary I found out that is not an entirely different color after all. "celeste" is actually defined in terms of blue, and I quote:
"1. loc. adj. azul más claro." which translates to "a lighter blue"
No, they are actually completely different colors. Moreover, there is no word that encompasses both. It is similar to the distinction between red and pink in English. (I don't think you would normally refer to a pink shade as red unless you were being very technical or something, and I can't think of a word that intuitively encompasses both reds and pinks.)
Looking around a bit, I found an interesting paper on the exact topic I was thinking about[1]. It turns out that the exact difference does affect color recognition, but the effect is "eliminated by a verbal, but not a spacial, dual task".
Of course, I think this is really the same effect as in the original article. The only reason it's important for me is that I experience it directly by knowing both languages.
Interestingly, Finnish had no word for pink (it was called light red, though a case could be made for roosa). There is one now (pinkki), but that's a loanword from English.
>No, they are actually completely different colors.
We use two different color names for dark and lighter blue in my language two.
But I find it hard to believe that Russians consider them "completely different colors".
Red and Green are completely different. Black and white. Orange and purple. The two colors for "blue" variations? Not so much.
And surely Russians can understand that, even if they consider the two different colors by name, because it's inherent in the concept of darker/lighter, or shades, etc.
(see also the answer of "cema", below).
I would guess that a Russian painter for example instinctively uses the exact same process of obtaining the two hues of blue from primary colors as a British painter...
When I think of pink, the first thing tha comes to mind is the "hot pink" used in breast cancer awareness and "girly stuff." This color is a mix of red and blue, putting it just shy of purple. I think magenta is the more correct name for it, but I'm more likely to attach pink to this color than to light red. Native English speaker, but there are probably other factors influencing our perception of colors.
Yes. Pink to my eyes is a kind of watered down red. Do you consider it any more different? Ie the kind of difference you get from purple vs yellow, or red vs green?
I have an opposite situation as a grown up learner of hungarian.
Hungarian has no "red", they have "blood/wine/redhead color" (vörös) and "sigarette pack/punk hair/paprika color" (piros).
As a foreigner I kept confusing them cause they do not map directly over the red names I know. I am _still_ not sure if darkness is all there is to the difference.
See this video related to what you just said. It is a clip from a BBC documentary about how a tribe has different color names than us and how it affects their ability to find an odd color out - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b71rT9fU-I
Particularly, I speak Russian as well as English. In Russian, we actually have two separate words for blue: one for light blue and one for dark blue. They are completely different colors. My idea was that this actually changes how Russians view colors as compared to English speakers. Good to see my idea has some scientific backing :).
I personally am in a particularly odd position: I learned Russian first but still learned English at a very young age (5) and have since used it more. I'm not entirely certain how this has affected my view of blue, but I think I see it more like English speakers (e.g. not differentiating between the two blues intuitively) than Russian speakers. This probably says something about my relative comfort in the two languages.
Another interesting thing is that for the longest time I did not even realize that the difference was so fundamental. I just took it in stride. When I thought about it, it was a little weird: there is actually a different set of colors (rather than just shades of color) in the two languages. The fact that I could go from one set to the other without noticing is rather interesting as well.