Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by IshKebab 974 days ago
Yeah and they also don't realise that "one word for two colours" is just nonsensical.

All words are descriptions for a continuous range of colours. Oa apparently just covers a particularly huge range. But you could equally say "ha those stupid English people only have one word for lilac and purple. Idiots!"

1 comments

I think the most common real-world example is Russian and Italian, which have a specific word for light-blue which is distinct from the word for blue.

I assume this is like how ‘pink’ is a special word for ‘light-red’.

You see the same thing in other areas. In Mandarin Chinese, the sounds represented by "si" in English vision or "r" in English virile are the same sound.

An English speaker (like speakers of many other languages) would find this ridiculous, but it is true that the two sounds represent either side of a completely arbitrary threshold applied to a continuous phenomenon.

It's like in English the sound represented by "ś" in Polish "ściągać" and "sz" in Polish "szumieć" are the same sound (usually written "sh") :).