[kortex]

I think what makes brown unique in this regard is its ubiquity in nature, partial desaturation, and lack of obvious mapping to a saturated color.

Emergence of names of colors in languages usually goes black, white, red, yellow, grue, then blue forks from blue, brown, orange, then "specialty" colors like pink, purple, indigo, teal. It's the only partially saturated shade that gets a name before its saturated variant (orange). Being able to name things brown is more important than orange, so that mental link is weaker. Hence why we have "dark blue" but brown is not "dark orange." (though I think some languages call it "dark red"? I'm a bit hazy on that detail)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term

[chrisseaton]

> lack of obvious mapping to a saturated color

30 degrees hue, 50% value, 100% saturated, looks exactly brown to me?

> brown is not "dark orange."

I think it is. In fact, take my 30 degrees hue, 50% value, 100% saturated, then gradually increase the value and see where you get to!

[retsibsi]

I don't think the other commenter is disagreeing with you on those things -- they're talking about human perceptions, and saying that although brown is in fact dark orange, that's not how we name it or how we tend to see it.

[retsibsi]

Just out of curiosity, what if you go to a significantly darker brown, say 30/100/20 h/s/v. Unfortunately these subjective tests will vary from monitor to monitor, but assuming that's still clearly brown rather than black to you (to me it's a more archetypal brown than the brighter version you initially named, which I might call orange-brown) -- what do you perceive when you keep the saturation and value fixed, and vary the hue? Would you agree that many or most of the other hues give you a colour more obviously 'dark X', where X is the 100%-value counterpart, than hue 30 does? For me it's much more obvious at the green-blue-purple segment of the spectrum than the red-orange-yellow segment.

This isn't meant as a trick question or anything -- if I'm getting at anything specific, it's that maybe part of the reason the orange-brown link seems more obvious to you than to me is that when you think of a central example of brown, you think of something brighter (and thus more obviously orange) than I do.

[chrisseaton]

> Would you agree that many or most of the other hues give you a colour more obviously 'dark X'

Hmm not really. But we're not going to resolve what seems like a subjective question!

[retsibsi]

Oh don't worry, I wasn't planning on trying to argue the point! Just genuinely curious about the extent to which our difference is perceptual/conceptual/other. If we disagree on the 'dark X' thing, it makes me think there's a real perceptual difference and/or a pretty deep conceptual one (in terms of how we divide up the colour spectrum), though of course it doesn't prove anything.