[vigilantpuma]

This test is really using how English organizes color. In English, blue and green are basic color terms ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms)). You're right that we would have trouble with an orange screen if we were asked to call it red or yellow, but that's because orange is also a basic color term in English.

Other languages draw those boundaries in different places. For example, in Russian, light blue and dark blue are separate basic color terms (goluboy vs. siniy), so asking a Russian speaker to collapse those into a single category would feel just as wrong as collapsing orange into red or yellow does to us.

Cyan isn't a basic color term in English. So yes, the test is basically asking: if you had to assign this color to one of the basic English categories, what would it be?

The frustration you're describing is kind of the point. With something like orange, English gives us a clear category, so "rounding" feels wrong. With cyan, it doesn't, so people end up splitting it differently.

[jounker]

The person you were responding to said that cyan feels like a completely different color to them, neither green nor blue. I had the same reaction when it gave me a color that I immediately identified as teal, and I learned my colors as a monolingual english speaker in Ohio. Therefore the supposition that all English speakers see only blue or green is an oversimplification.

[vigilantpuma]

I didn't say that English speakers only see blue or green. I said that those are the two basic color terms that cyan is in between, and cyan isn't a basic color term and thus collapses to one or the other if categorized under basic color terms. Same goes for teal.

[mathw]

And this changes over time, because for me cyan IS a basic colour term and I'm a native English speaker.

[vigilantpuma]

With all due respect, you're one individual and basic color terms for a language are not determined by a single individual. If you look at usage via proxies like Google ngrams[1] or Google trends[2], cyan barely registers, which suggests it hasn't really shifted to a basic color term.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=black%2Cwhite%...

[2] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Red%2Cgreen%2Cyellow%2Cb...

[djaro]

But its frequency still rose by over 300x since the start of the chart, which might suggest that for some people it is a basic color term.

"English" isn't one monolith. Every English speaker speaks their own version, some closer to each other than others, and new features are constantly being added or removed.

[vigilantpuma]

The further you have to narrow down the set of speakers for whom it's a basic color term, the less of a basic color term it is for English as a whole. We don't have to have this argument about e.g. orange.

[kogold]

Thanks, this seemed obvious to me too. But I would add, this could apply to orange too - there are a lot of orange tones between yellow and red, and if you likewise wanted to determine your subjective boundary, which this is only about, you would be able to say "rather red for me" or "rather yellow for me", regardless of the intermediate color. Since the space of colors can be described as convex, so to speak, you can between every two arbitrary colors determine your subjective decision boundary, regardless of any color in between. The premise is just accepting to ignore those colors.

[something765478]

I'm a Russian speaker, but I've never thought of goluboy and siniy as separate colors, unlike blue and green. To me, goluboy and siniy are like pink and red; just different shades of the same color.

[juliansark]

You blew my mind with "pink and red being different shades of the same color".

p.s. I am color vision handicapped or whatever that is called.

[thaumasiotes]

> You blew my mind with "pink and red being different shades of the same color".

This is also how native English speakers (with color vision) view pink and red. Compare the classic dialogue from Red vs Blue ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCwYfSeqAw8#t=47 ):

Look at it! It's not pink! It's like a... a lightish red.

Guess what. They already have a color for lightish red. You know what it's called? PINK.

[vigilantpuma]

Pink and red are also separate basic color terms in English!

[orloffm]

Yes, the middle color there on the results page is clearly "goluboy" to me, so I my line is at ~33%, in the middle between green and goluboy.

[suslik]

> Other languages draw those boundaries in different places. For example, in Russian, light blue and dark blue are separate basic color terms (goluboy vs. siniy), so asking a Russian speaker to collapse those into a single category would feel just as wrong as collapsing orange into red or yellow does to us.

I don't know. I am a russian speaker and for me light blue (goluboy) is simply a type of blue.