It seems that we do see colours the same, despite cultural differences. [The spelling of "colour" is not a universal, though, as Americans don't know how to spell it properly.]
From Abidji to English to Zapoteco, the perception and naming of color is remarkably consistent in the world's languages.
Across cultures, people tend to classify hundreds of different chromatic colors into eight distinct categories: red, green, yellow-or-orange, blue, purple, brown, pink and grue (green-or-blue), say researchers in this week's online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The abstract is:
We analyzed the World Color Survey (WCS) color-naming data set by using k-means cluster and concordance analyses. Cluster analysis relied on a similarity metric based on pairwise Pearson correlation of the complete chromatic color-naming patterns obtained from individual WCS informants. When K, the number of k-means clusters, varied from 2 to 10, we found that (i) the average color-naming patterns of the clusters all glossed easily to single or composite English patterns, and (ii) the structures of the k-means clusters unfolded in a hierarchical way that was reminiscent of the Berlin and Kay sequence of color category evolution. Gap statistical analysis showed that 8 was the optimal number of WCS chromatic categories: RED, GREEN, YELLOW-OR-ORANGE, BLUE, PURPLE, BROWN, PINK, and GRUE (GREEN-OR-BLUE). Analysis of concordance in color naming within WCS languages revealed small regions in color space that exhibited statistically significantly high concordance across languages. These regions agreed well with five of six primary focal colors of English. Concordance analysis also revealed boundary regions of statistically significantly low concordance. These boundary regions coincided with the boundaries associated with English WARM and COOL. Our results provide compelling evidence for similarities in the mechanisms that guide the lexical partitioning of color space among WCS languages and English.
It's an Open Access article in PDF.
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We'll learn to spell "colour" about the same time the English learn to spell "aluminum".
(We can negotiate if they instead start writing and saying "molybdenium" and "platinium" so as to at least be consistent...)
So that's your programme, is it?
While we're at it, can we switch over to metric, too?
Color is an interesting subject when you start to think about color perception across different species. While humans perceive three distinct wavelengths (hence, we talk about three primary colors), other animals perceive fewer or more dictinct wavelengths, and different wavelengths than we do. It occured to me a while back that if we were to meet an alien lifeform, it's perception of color will probably be completely different than ours because they detect fewer or more primary colors, and they will almost certainly be at different wavelengths than our perception. They might perceive color in the same general IR spectrum as we do, but if they perceive wavelengths outside our perception (like bees do) or if their perceptions of color are shifted to different wavelengths, it would be hard to discuss the "color" of an object with them.
This study is interesting in the sense that it verifies the number of basic color categories and their hue constancy across cultures, yet it is limited in the sense that it does not provide the definitive evidence that the color perception is, and has been, the same across all languages.
The hierarchical cluster tree that they present in their paper, is highly reflective of the original Kay evolution of color terms. though the authors are quick to distance themselves from this interpretation, it remains a fact that if a clustering of less than 8 is forced on the data, then the colors cluster around the hues that are predicted by the color terms evolution model. Thus, for languages included in the survey, that had less color terms than 8, then their color terms had clustered around the Hues predicted by the Kay model. thus, this study does not rule out the stage based color-terms language evolution and development model that I have discussed extensively on my blog.
On the contrary, this study is a strong evidence for the stage-based evolution of color terms. If a language had only three color terms, while the other language had eight, we would have expected the 3 color terms in the first language to reflect different hues than the second language color terms(the color terms in the first language have to account for, on-an-average, 3 color terms of the second language and thus the hue denoted by these color terms would be very different from the hues denoted by second language color terms). However, it so happens, that despite having only 3 color terms, the color terms of first language too, cluster around one of the basic eight colors. Thus, the first language has 3 color terms that cluster closely around the 3 of the basic eight hues; while it has no special terms for the remaining 5 Hues. If the hues denoted by the color terms in these deficient/old languages had shifted to some average value, then they would not have clustered around the basic eight hues. The fact that they cluster around the basic eight hues, proves that some languages do not have color terms for some hues and thus do not perceive them differently or specially.