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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Actually people will definitely insist on "no that's blue" or "no that's green." My husband and I have frequent disagreements about a specific shade of blue/green. I think it's blue. He thinks it's green.
Musk is a clearly brilliant man who does not know how to keep his mouth shut or not act like a teenager. I know he doesn't need my respect... But he's certainly lost all of it by now.
And for people who are like "yeah but he gets results," are you really saying he wouldn't be getting more results if he didn't spend the last 10 years being an idiot online?
Nobody is against hard work, but what's the point of working harder than you need to for a company that has shown that hard work is no defense against being laid off?
Why would anyone be motivated to work 60 hours a week on Sergei's say-so when Google has amply demonstrated that they will lay people off at random regardless of their work ethic or contributions? I would think the layoffs demoralize people a lot more than the work habits of their colleagues.
The time for this sort of exhortation was before 2023, Sergei.
To me it is just another step in series of layoffs. Throw some insults see if some leave after this humiliation. Or they pretend nothing has happened and wait for their turn in next layoff.
Have 500-750 key employees departed? Or even threatened to depart? OpenAI has (well, had) 770 employees, you think Microsoft will lure away 70-97% of them?
I think having children is pretty selfish also. You bring a child into this world... for what? To see yourself continued in the next generation? To make some future friends for yourself? To have that experience? How are these not selfish things? Both choices are selfish in different ways. The fact that one requires some personal sacrifice doesn't make it selfless.
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.