> In an industrialized culture, most people get by with 11 color words: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple and gray
Native Danish speaker, and I really only acknowledge eight true colours: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, and gray. Perhaps tellingly, all those that come with solid, earthy, Germanic names. Orange and purple are clearly much later imports, and while I do of course use the words, I cannot help regarding those two as constructs - blends of yellow/red and blue/red. Pink is such a recent import, it has only really become a term in my lifetime. It is not a word I would normally use, except in a sort of ironic context. I would always default to "light red".
My no nonsense daughter, in her twenties, insists that pink is definitely its own colour - not the same as light red. But then, as I understand it, female eyes can see further along the infrared spectrum than male ones. I assume women have a richer perception of most things reddish than the rest of us.
Pink/magenta comes from stimulating S (blue) and L (red) receptors simultaneously while not stimulating M (green). It's actually rather unique in that respect. It's the "glue" your brain uses to paste the red and blue ends of the spectrum together, because the visible electromagnetic spectrum has two edges (blue and red, high and low frequency respectively) while the perception of hue does not (see: color wheel). The only color you won't find on a rainbow, so to speak.
If you say "I can make magenta by mixing white and red light," I'll come back and say "OK, what do you call the color you get when you subsequently filter out green?"
Yes it is cultural, but it's complicated. There are some aspects of colour that are cultural, but there are also biological asymmetries so to speak, we don't actually distinguish red/green/blue equally well, the colour receptors we have are more like red-yellow/yellow-green/blue for example.
It's also something of a linguistic constant that red is most basic "chromatic" colour to distinguish, after making the the distinction between white and black. Perhaps because blood is red?
The science of colour and colour perception is an incredibly fascinating subject, that even Goethe had a hand in shaping. I really recommend you to read at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision
Native Danish speaker, and I really only acknowledge eight true colours: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, and gray. Perhaps tellingly, all those that come with solid, earthy, Germanic names. Orange and purple are clearly much later imports, and while I do of course use the words, I cannot help regarding those two as constructs - blends of yellow/red and blue/red. Pink is such a recent import, it has only really become a term in my lifetime. It is not a word I would normally use, except in a sort of ironic context. I would always default to "light red".
My no nonsense daughter, in her twenties, insists that pink is definitely its own colour - not the same as light red. But then, as I understand it, female eyes can see further along the infrared spectrum than male ones. I assume women have a richer perception of most things reddish than the rest of us.