Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by monocasa 1593 days ago
It's not biological evolution, but linguistic evolution at play. There's a specific evolutionary pattern for color words in language found for the most part (albeit like everything in language and evolution, there's always exceptions to the pattern):

All language known have terms for black and white.

If a language has three color terms, the third is 'red'.

If a language has four color terms, the fourth is either 'green' or 'yellow'.

If a language has five color terms, the fifth is the other of 'green' or 'yellow'.

If a language has six terms, the sixth is 'blue'.

If a language has seven terms, the seventh is 'brown'.

And from there it starts to heavily diverge with purple, pink, orange, grey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
2 comments
lokar 1593 days ago
Brown is just dark orange

https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU

link
teawrecks 1593 days ago
Not sure what you mean by, "It's not biological evolution". The linguistic phenomenon you're referencing doesn't make any sense outside the context of the specific evolutionary history of the human eye. It would be like saying the shape of something has nothing to do with the shadow it casts.
link
monocasa 1593 days ago
Sure it does, because there's languages in use today that don't separate blue from green, and those native speakers absolutely have blue cones in addition to green and red ones. Language development is fairly universally thought to have happened after we evolved our blue sensing cones, so that doesn't explain the difference. Specifically we evolved blue cones about 30 million years ago, before we were any semblance of human.

The thought is that it's a phenomenon that by giving a name to the concept and training your young, our brains become better at differentiating it at a conscious level. The progression in language is thought to be an artifact of how strongly the differences between naturally occut colors appear to our brains, and an innate way to separate the state space of natural color rather than a purely mirroring of biological evolution of color sensing hardware in the eye.

link