This post was really interesting and made me think a bit differently about color names (I think to an even deeper extend than the xkcd survey post from a couple years ago). I also found the first comment [1] quite interesting, namely this part:
For example, ao in Japanese comes from the dye plant, ai, which as a dyestuff covers the whole of the blue-green portion of the spectrum. Some cultures have what might at first seem to be peculiarly chosen "basic" color names until you learn their associations with the culture's central food sources or dye plants, or precious commodities. The color name that covers both blue and green in many native languages of the American Southwest is also the name for the stone, turquoise. (In cultures where a staple food is poisonous when green and edible when red, you can be sure there are names for green and red.) In our own history, we have a very similar example to the "blue" traffic lights of Japan: "orange" didn't enter English as a color name until the 16th century, after the fruit itself was first brought to England, quite late in the evolution of our color vocabulary, which is why we still refer to "red" hair.
What's funny about that comment (and a handful of others that follow) is that they completely miss the fact that "turquoise" is probably one of the most prominent examples of a "made up" color name coming from the French for "Turkish".
For example, ao in Japanese comes from the dye plant, ai, which as a dyestuff covers the whole of the blue-green portion of the spectrum. Some cultures have what might at first seem to be peculiarly chosen "basic" color names until you learn their associations with the culture's central food sources or dye plants, or precious commodities. The color name that covers both blue and green in many native languages of the American Southwest is also the name for the stone, turquoise. (In cultures where a staple food is poisonous when green and edible when red, you can be sure there are names for green and red.) In our own history, we have a very similar example to the "blue" traffic lights of Japan: "orange" didn't enter English as a color name until the 16th century, after the fruit itself was first brought to England, quite late in the evolution of our color vocabulary, which is why we still refer to "red" hair.
[1] http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication...