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I don't think you need alien civilizations for this. Not all human languages have color words that map 1:1 to English color words. (I seem to recall that the word for "red" in Korean includes what English speakers would call "copper". I could be mistaken.)
I also recall hearing that in Russian, there are separate words for "blue" and "light blue", just as English has a special word "pink" for "light red".
Dunno about Russian, but Hebrew has them for sure -- "T'khelet" means "Light blue", "Kakhol" means "blue". I know quite a few bilingual ~5yo kids, who, if they're wearing a light blue T-shirt, will scream at you if you say "you have a Kakhol T-shirt" in Hebrew, but will happily agree they are wearing a "blue" T-shirt -- thus showing that sufficient lack of reflectivity can have two conflicting vision systems in the same individual. (BTW -- "light blue" is just an approximation, it's a specific shade of light blue).
Italian has azzurro for ‘light blue’, but nowadays it's not that unusual to use blu for that colour when the difference doesn't matter. (I was thinking that this might be a relatively recent influence of English blue, then I remembered about a famous mid-20th-century song which refers to the sky as blu.)
I don't think that necessarily follows.
In Spanish there also a word for light blue, "celeste" (etymologically related to "sky"), and how appropriate it is to say just "azul" (blue) instead of "celeste" depends on context. For example, an Argentine would never call their flag "azul y blanca" (blue and white) since they are taught from childhood that it is "celeste y blanca". But they wouldn't mind saying the sky on a clear day is either "azul" or "celeste". A same piece of light blue cloth might be called "celeste" in some occasions, and "azul" in others--for example if one just wants to contrast it with a red one.
Yeah, in flags, football jerseys, etc. Italian is more precise too, using blu only for royal blue or darker, celeste for sky blue or lighter, and azzurro for intermediate shades of blue.
(I think I saw a list of English--Italian ‘false friends’ which listed blu/blue as false friends, saying that It. blu corresponds to Engl. navy blue and Engl. blue corresponds to It. azzurro! In some specific contexts that might well be/have been the case, but I don't think there are that many people left who would normally use azzurro for (say) Uno cards, let alone people who would consider it exceedingly weird if you called such a card blu.)
Yup! In Russian, dark blue is "golubuy" and light blue is "siniy".
That's backwards. Apologies if this response is too late for you to care.
If only English had words like azure, sapphire, smalt, aqua, turquoise, periwinkle, iris, cerulean, ultramarine, verdigris, waterspout, zaffre or cyan to distinguish such nuances of colour! Of course, the precise boundaries between the various areas of RGB that are given a label and commonly emphasised in speech will vary dramatically between cultures.
There was an experiment done where participants were shown two shades of blue and asked if they were both the same, or slightly different. When the two shades of blue fell on different sides of the goluboy/siniy divide, Russian-speakers were much better than English speakers at distinguishing them, but they were no better when both would be goluboy or both siniy. Language distinctions do have cognitive consequences.
Speaking Russian is far from the only relevant difference between Russian-speakers and non-Russian-speakers. What experiment are you referring to, specifically?
This one.
Thank you.
Standard causal reversal: In Soviet Russia, biological colour distinction causes linguistic colour distinction!
The difference is that, in English, "cyan", like your other listed examples except the ones that I think are actually green or purple, is a kind of blue (like sepia is a kind of brown, canary is a kind of yellow, etc.), while "pink" is not a kind of red. In Russian, golubuy is not a kind of siniy, and vice versa.
I think color words in languages are really interesting. Some languages have only three very basic ones that aren't kinds of anything else, and these tend to be translated as "black", "white", and "red" - dark, light, and bright colors. (They translate the bright color as "red" because if you have lots of objects in the room and ask someone who speaks this language to point to the best example of that color, they'll pick something bright red.) These three words are privileged in English too: they're the only ones we modify with -en to indicate that something is becoming more that color (redden, blacken, whiten - never bluen or greenen).
"Cyan" is one of the least "blue" on the list and I almost omitted it. These days I'd even tend to consider some of those others "shades of cyan". Too much study of web design tends to corrupt perception the same way native language does.
Certainly. Words for other common concepts operate the same way, framing the way we think and influencing the way we slice up reality. But with colors the differences are far easier to study. What cannot be seen with a glance we can quantify with a digital camera.
I think it's reasonably likely that the general population of English speakers will consider cyan its own thing after a while, in large part for the reason you mention.
Probably, getting included in the 16 colour palette computers used at times and being the name for one of the subtractive primary colours brings it up a bit in popularity.
How often are most of those used? I recognize most, but I've probably used... five of them in the past year, and I thought verdigris was green. -_-
About half of them are used enough to be considered 'words' not 'scrabble words' according to my ad hoc classification scheme.