13 July 2020 @ 02:40 am
Sunshine Challenge 2020 - Prompt 4 (Green) - Take 2  


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.

 
 
 
 
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oldtoadwoman[personal profile] oldtoadwoman on July 15th, 2020 03:30 am (UTC)
Re: 💚
Yeah, it's the classic Newton Roy G Biv split:


Visible Light

"Blue" is a broad term that I think most people will consider contains everything from turquoise to indigo. When you define the rainbow with the traditional 7-label split then you end up calling turquoise "blue" but, personally, when I hear "blue" I'm picturing something closer to indigo. So it's all very muddled in my head. I'll blame Newton, I guess. (I lean more towards indigo dye being the color of indigo, but… indigo flowers edge into purple.)

My biggest pet peeve is when people mix up chartreuse and puce. (If you do a google image search for "puce", there are inevitably a handful of chartreuse things mixed in because so many people mix up the names despite the colors being nothing alike.)
greerwatson[personal profile] greerwatson on July 15th, 2020 06:29 am (UTC)
Re: 💚
"When you define the rainbow with the traditional 7-label split then you end up calling turquoise "blue" but, personally, when I hear "blue" I'm picturing something closer to indigo."

Same here.
greerwatson[personal profile] greerwatson on July 15th, 2020 07:37 am (UTC)
Re: 💚
""Blue" is a broad term that I think most people will consider contains everything from turquoise to indigo"

It's been a long while since I've read Berlin & Kay; but, as I recall they asked native speakers to segment a colour array using their language's basic colour terms. Thus a broad range of hues identifiable with that term could be identified. Subjects were also asked to point out the foci for each basic colour. Berlin and Kay found that, cross-linguistically, the foci for colours like red, yellow, green, etc. were fairly consistent, though the range of colours so identified varied enormously. Essentially, the more colour terms your language has, the more tightly you draw the boundaries; but you'll always put the central colour (e.g. the ideal red, the perfect example of blue, etc.) in much the same place.

My recollection is that, when plotting English colour terms, they wound up with a a big gap where true turquoise shades would be. Then again, they didn't consider "turquoise" a basic colour term; so their subjects would not have been allowed to identify colour chips as turquoise.

Without having the book in front of me, I can't tell you what their test subjects picked as focal blue. And, as I recall, they told readers up front that the printing process made the picture of the colour array inaccurate anyway; so that doesn't help much!

When we do the next colour, I'll be sure to do my best to show focal blue and turquoise for me. But it'll be by what I see on my monitor; so there's no saying how you'll see it.   :(
oldtoadwoman: Kermit the Frog[personal profile] oldtoadwoman on July 16th, 2020 01:47 am (UTC)
Re: 💚
they didn't consider "turquoise" a basic colour term; so their subjects would not have been allowed to identify colour chips as turquoise.

Hrmph. Poor planning on their part. I'd probably call it "cyan" instead of turquoise because when I think of colors, I'm more likely to think of paint or ink. I tend to think of "turquoise" mainly as the stone.
greerwatson[personal profile] greerwatson on July 16th, 2020 04:53 am (UTC)
Re: 💚
Preconceptions do tend to lead to poor experimental design.   ;)
greerwatson[personal profile] greerwatson on July 15th, 2020 07:50 am (UTC)
Re: 💚
"My biggest pet peeve is when people mix up chartreuse and puce."

Well, to me, those terms mean something along these lines:







CHARTREUSE
PUCE


oldtoadwoman[personal profile] oldtoadwoman on July 16th, 2020 02:00 am (UTC)
Re: 💚
Yup. "Fun" fact: "puce" is the French word for flea, so it's meant to be the color of a blood-engorged flea.

:-)

Interestingly, if you google "chartreuse" you won't see examples of puce. The error only seems to work the other way around. (I'm vaguely curious about what the alcohol chartreuse tastes like, but not enough to go out and actually buy some.)