Sunshine Challenge 2020 - Prompt 4 (Green) - Take 2

[greerwatson]

As someone who likes green, I look at it in comparison with other colours, and I think it gets sadly short-changed. I mean, just consider this:

YELLOW			YELLOW
ORANGE			GREEN
RED			GREEN
BROWN			GREEN

I mean, sure, we have names for the different greens. I'd call the lighter one "lime" and the muted one "olive". But they are still considered to be types of green. Suppose you had T-shirts striped like this:





The first one is striped in orange & yellow, the second in red & yellow, and the third in brown & yellow. However, as far as the others are concerned, if you were given any one of them on its own, you'd probably describe it as being green & yellow.

Of course, we do have names for specific shades of green: ivy green, spruce green, emerald green, spinach green and so on; but these are comparable to "canary yellow", "daffodil yellow", "sunshine yellow", and the like. The point is that lime is as different as orange, and olive as different as brown; but neither is considered to be a totally separate colour.

In fact, it gets more complicated when we look at colours that lie between lime (on the one hand) and orange (on the other hand) and pure yellow. Colours that are almost yellow.





You can run a sequence of interpolating these shades between yellow and either orange or (lime) green:









But if you compare them instead with red and its equivalent shade of green, they look practically yellow! (But not quite.)









When you look at them all together, you can see that they're the missing part of the sequence: you need these additional colours in order to get a proper gradation.





They don't have separate names, though. There really aren't enough names for colours.

Comments

[silveradept]

Thanks for this. I hope I'm seeing them well and correctly, but there seems to be a lot of variance in the spectrum of "green".

I'm beginning to think there's been an arbitrary wavelength that's been determined to be the unmarked version of the color and everything else is some other shade or color that requires a descriptive adjective or another name applied.

[greerwatson]

"I'm beginning to think there's been an arbitrary wavelength that's been determined to be the unmarked version of the color"

This is the question that Berlin & Kay tried to answer in their Basic Color Terms. They found that, particularly for the most basic colours like RED, YELLOW, and GREEN, people speaking different languages nevertheless all tended to pick much the same wavelength as the unmarked (or focal) colour. However, when demarking the broad boundaries of shades to which the term could apply, they did it quite differently.

There are a lot more details, some controversial; but I think they did a fair job of proving their basic premise. It's actually not arbitrary.

[silveradept]

That's even weirder. So people broadly agree where the unmarked color is, but vary greatly at where the boundaries are for it.

Thank you for the continued color posts, they're fascinating.

[greerwatson]

I'm not sure it's actually weirder. It'll have something to do with the wavelengths that stimulate the photoreceptors in the human eye. We have three types of cones; so it'll involve the way they interact.