I would love to know if "Cambridge Blue" is actually blue to the average person, because, to me, it's green...
Is my blue your blue? (2024)
321–330 of 483 posts
Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)
#322As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow. I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained sin…
It does seem like more of a test of if you consider turquoise to be "a green" or "a blue"
Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)
#323As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow. I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained sin…
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.
Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)
#324hue 174, "true median" .-.
Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)
#325I would love to know if "Cambridge Blue" is actually blue to the average person, because, to me, it's green... [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Blue_(colour)
that's green! whoever invented the name of the colour had a different vision
Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)
#326Younger locals who have mostly or only known the LED think it's a bit odd, but just call them blue because that's the common convention and many youths may think that the former lights might have actually been blue.
IIRC from when I moved to Japan the first time (30+ y ago) when the old lights were standard, being a wildly curious Gaijin enough to ask "why" about these kinds of strange contradictions, and having lots of exposure in that time to senior citizens who had the spare time and inclination to humor my incessant questions, several of these octogenarian to centarians remembered the introduction of the first gen traffic lights, when the automobile became common enough to require them; and this seeming contradiction was new; this was the explanation I have heard common across several distinct conversations in different towns:
1. 緑 "midori" as a character and word for green was not very common usage before the end of WWII.
2. The (pre-LED) lamps for all three were yellow bulbs viewed through glass filters that were 'red', 'clear-somewhat yellow', and 'blue' - so even though it may appear green, the blue was for the color of the glass.
Also because 青い "aoi" has persisted in use for certain shades of 'green' - for example green apples and leafy fresh veggies; so this 'blue' seems to match the actual color of the light and has an implicit meaning for Japanese - in the sense of 'go while light is still fresh' - and Japanese humor is primarily Punny instead of being actually Funny, so this double meaning resonates even after switching to truly green LED light sources.
Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)
#327This is cretinous. There's a well defined colour in between blue and green which is turquoise / cyan. It even says at the end "You see turquoise as x". No I don't, I see it as turquoise. It's like asking is the red or is this yellow without acknowledging the existence of orange. Either rage bait or pure idiocy.
Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)
#328"for you, turquoise is blue." Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.
Some languages uses the terms "turquoise green" and "turquoise blue", but still have "turquoise" as a standalone. It would be interesting to have that tested, e.g. when do you use each term, when do you go from "turquoise blue" to "this is just turquoise"?
Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there really people whose language treats “cyan” and “turquoise” as distinct colors which are not in the “blue-green” family?
I don't know if there are people who treat turquoise and aqua as distinct, but I certainly treat them as distinct from blue (azure, cobalt) and green. Several of the colors around the mid range in the linked page are not colors I would use the words "blue" or "green" for. That doesn't mean that I have strict rules here; I don't actually know if I would call what you call "cyan" turquoise or blue; ditto plenty of othe…
Our green cones are the most sensitive and their range significantly overlaps with red cones, so it's only natural that going from green towards red you'll be able to make clearer distinctions between colors than the other way.
Also, yellow-blue and red-green are opponents that can't be mixed because of how our retinas preprocess the signals from cones. Therefore, you obviously end up with blue-green (cyan), red-yellow (orange), yellow-green (lime) and blue-red (magenta, which actually doesn't exist on the light spectrum) families of related colors.
Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
My daughter was watching Blue's Clues. They were doing color combinations (red + blue = purple, yellow + blue = green, etc). They then also did a further step, blue + green = cyan, and did green + yellow = chartreuse. Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct.
The funny part about color spaces being that you can't make (pure) cyan out of green and blue, which is exactly why CMYK is used over RYB in inks. (I mostly think about colours in Hue-Saturation-Value terms, and a hue wheel of blue-cyan-green-yellow-orange-red-purple)
For subtractive colors (dyes) you're right. For additive (light), green and blue make cyan (Hex: #00FFFF)