Eli5 why is light red (pink) its own color but light blue and light yellow aren’t?
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What do you mean? Of course they have names. Periwinkle?
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Pink is actually a combination of red and violet, two colors, which, if you look at a rainbow, are on the opposite sides of the arc.
In some languages they are. Light blue has a word for itself in Russian and Italian. Some languages also have fewer color names. Japanese has the same word for green and blue. They are distinguished between by calling them “forest green” for green and “ocean green” for blue. Ancient Greek texts have also called the ocean purple when describing a dark ocean in stormy conditions. Specifically they call it “blue like wine” because their word for purple was a dark blue.
We’ve also let computers develop their own names for colors. First they distinguish between light and dark, and then the first color that gets a name is red, because it’s the most visually distinct, then green, yellow, orange, blue, purple, light blue, turquoise, etc. As the colors get more complex, the names take longer to be made. We see the same effect in the evolution of language, we suspect that light and dark would be distinguished between, then red, followed by the other colors. Japanese hadn’t developed its own word for blue, so just added a modifier for green, just as English hasn’t developed a word for light blue, so we just added a modifier to blue.
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