“Cyan” isn’t a basic color term in English; English speakers ordinarily consider cyan to be a variant of blue, not something basically separate. Something that is cyan could also be described in English as “blue”. As opposed to say, red and pink—these are both basic color terms in English; an English speaker would not ordinarily refer to something pink as “red”, or vice versa.
Or in other words: Color words don’t refer to points in color space, they refer to regions, which means that you can look at how those regions overlap—some may be subsets of others, some may be disjoint (well—not disjoint per se, but thought of as disjoint, since obviously you can find things near the boundary that won’t be judged consistently), etc. Having words “blue” and “cyan” that refer to two thought-of-as-disjoint regions is pretty different from having words “blue” and “cyan” where the latter refers to a subset of the former.
So, it’s not as simple as saying “English also has a word cyan”—yes, it does, but the meaning of that word, and the relation of its meaning to that of “blue”, is pretty different. These translated words don’t quite correspond; we’re taking regions in color space, and translating them to words that refer to similar regions, regions that contain a number of the same points, but not the same ones.
The bit in the comic about “Eurocentric paint” obviously doesn’t quite make sense as stated—the division of the rainbow doesn’t come from paint! -- but a paint set that focused on the central examples of basic color terms of a particular language could reasonably be called a that-language-centric paint set. In any case the basic point is just that dividing up color space into basic color terms has a large cultural component to it.
“Cyan” isn’t a basic color term in English; English speakers ordinarily consider cyan to be a variant of blue, not something basically separate. Something that is cyan could also be described in English as “blue”. As opposed to say, red and pink—these are both basic color terms in English; an English speaker would not ordinarily refer to something pink as “red”, or vice versa.
Or in other words: Color words don’t refer to points in color space, they refer to regions, which means that you can look at how those regions overlap—some may be subsets of others, some may be disjoint (well—not disjoint per se, but thought of as disjoint, since obviously you can find things near the boundary that won’t be judged consistently), etc. Having words “blue” and “cyan” that refer to two thought-of-as-disjoint regions is pretty different from having words “blue” and “cyan” where the latter refers to a subset of the former.
So, it’s not as simple as saying “English also has a word cyan”—yes, it does, but the meaning of that word, and the relation of its meaning to that of “blue”, is pretty different. These translated words don’t quite correspond; we’re taking regions in color space, and translating them to words that refer to similar regions, regions that contain a number of the same points, but not the same ones.
The bit in the comic about “Eurocentric paint” obviously doesn’t quite make sense as stated—the division of the rainbow doesn’t come from paint! -- but a paint set that focused on the central examples of basic color terms of a particular language could reasonably be called a that-language-centric paint set. In any case the basic point is just that dividing up color space into basic color terms has a large cultural component to it.