Last semester, I've learned that Russian speakers can distinguish more variations of blue than English speakers because they possess a richer vocabulary for the blue color category. I also found another interesting study by Deshpande(2015), which revealed that Korean speakers perceive green colors with greater precision than English speakers. While English speakers typically use a single basic color term "green," Koreans employ specific terms like 'yeondu' (yellow-green/light-green) and 'chorok' (green) to distinguish various shades. The study also found that Koreans exhibit an interesting pattern in the blue category, differentiating between light and dark regions of blue within the color space.
As we know that there are different systems for primary colors, I found an interesting example in East Asian countries (including Korea). They have five elemental colors as their primary color system, which includes Red, Yellow, Black, White, and Blue!
Thus, I wanted to focus on blue, because we can see that Koreans used blue as a primary color traditionally, although previous studies focused mainly on green. For this concept of 'blue,' Korean has a word "puruda". It mainly indicates blue but also green or a mixture of the two; So this word technically falls under the category of โgrue(green+blue)โ. For instance, Koreans say "pureun haneul" for blue sky, "pureun sup" for green forest, and "pureun ok" for mint jade. 'Chorok' (่็ถ ), a relatively late loanword from Chinese characters, may be a trace of blue being used as a more foundational color.
The phenomenon in Japanese is similar. While 'Ao' means blue and 'midori' means green, they say 'Ao Shingou' for a green traffic light. A similar thing happens in Korean: 'parang' in Korean means blue, but we use the term for a green traffic light as well. Many Koreans refer to green traffic lights as "paranbul", although "chorokbul" is also used. 'Parang' is a pure Korean word, allowing for verb conjugation (e.g., 'paratta'), whereas 'chorok' is a Chinese character word and does not undergo such conjugation, meaning there's no adjective form for 'chorok'.
The Korean blue-related words 'parang' or 'puruda' have many variations of blue and also expand to the category of green. This illustrates that these words cover a wide spectrum of blue/green hues. The nuance is expressed by adjusting saturation and brightness rather than through entirely different color names.
From this observation, I wanted to explore the grue category in Korean, investigating the connection between literacy, color perception, and their emotions. I made a test platform for this purpose, named "Colorfish Test."
The purpose of this test is to collect participants' literacy through their media use and the capacity for describing colors and their emotion for colors in the grue category. The test matches your colorfish in the results page, based on your literacy and color perception accuracy.
If you are interested, it is available to participate here:
The test will take approximately 5 minutes. I would be grateful if you participate and enjoy this!
I was a squid, by the way. What's your colorfish? ๐
