Your linguistic tidbit of the day

I just read this, which is a summation of an interesting study done on childhood development of color recognition. I'm not going to talk about the whole thing (except to say that I, too, had the same idea for a prank as he did), just this one paragraph that really stood out at me:

A large body of research has shown that adults categorize colors into eleven basic categories: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey. These categories have been tested extensively, even across cultures, and found to be readily identifiable by all adults. When asked to name colors across a wide spectrum of possibilities, most people use the basic color categories to describe even the colors that fall on the border between two categories.

This brings up something interesting about Russian that I had noticed but not really considered before my Comparative Mythology professor pointed it out. He was discussing how we tend to naturally divide things into categories, especially into binary categories: left & right, up & down, black & white, male & female, dead & alive, human & not human. And when we find things that don't fit in either category, we get rather distressed. Consider how much opposition to gay rights comes from the belief that gay men aren't truly "masculine" -- they don't fit neatly into the perceived categories of "male" and "female". Or abortion -- a fetus isn't quite "human", but it's not quite "not human" either.

But I digress. In the course of this brief discussion, he brought up an interesting fact about Russian: they have two words for what we would consider "blue". There's синий ("cee-nee") and there's голубой ("gah-loo-boy"), which translate respectively to "blue" and "light blue." As my Mythology professor drilled home to me: to us, these are fairly arbitrary distinctions, as "light blue" is just a subset of "blue"; but to Russians, these are two completely different colors. So my Russian textbook has not eleven basic colors, but twelve -- the eleven mentioned above, plus "light blue." I really do have to wonder how cross-cultural these color studies actually are. I suppose if limited to just those eleven choices a Russian could decide that something they'd normally call голубой fits more with "blue" than any of the other categories, but still.