BlueAjah comments on A Fable of Science and Politics - Less Wrong

113 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 December 2006 04:50AM

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Comment author: BlueAjah 12 January 2013 02:00:22PM 4 points [-]

But there can't be any cross-cultural confusion, because it is written in English. Vietnamese or Japanese people either know what the English words "blue" and "green" mean, or they don't speak English at all and wouldn't be reading this story.

And if the story was written in Vietnamese, it would use "xanh lá cây" which means green and "xanh dương" which means blue, rather than just "xanh". Just because people normally use the same word to describe two different colours, doesn't mean they can't see the difference between those colours, and don't have ways of describing the difference when they need to.