Template talk:list:basic colors/en

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Template:list:basic colors/en

Inherent POV. There is no definition on what a "basic color" is, so this can never be neutral. -- Liliana • 12:09, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

True, but it is a useful list. Can anyone think of a more neutral name? — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 05:44, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Some things aren't inherently neutral, we just keep editing them until we're happy with them. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:00, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Well then, why is purple a "basic color" but not brown or pink? -- Liliana • 11:57, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Because nobody added brown and pink to the list yet?

Also, the template could be renamed to Template:list:colors/en, for example, if people think it should.

--Daniel 12:34, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

It is one of those things where you could legitimately add and remove things forever. Undoubtedly some color names are more well known than others, but where do you draw the line? But... is that enough of a reason to delete it? Mglovesfun (talk) 13:02, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I would consider a colour basic when it belongs to the core vocabulary and is morphologically simple. Something like 'sky-blue' clearly isn't basic. This can differ by language, too. In many languages, the term for 'blue' is not a basic colour, instead they use grue. —CodeCat 13:15, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

So you'd have red, magenta and fuchsia all as basic colors? -- Liliana • 13:17, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I would consider red a basic colour. But magenta and fuchsia are more rare and they're not the kind of colour every speaker (particularly, every child) is expected to know, so they are not core vocabulary. —CodeCat 13:19, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

If we wanted more neutral lists of colours... well, there's the RYB primary and secondary subtractive colours: red, yellow, blue, orange, purple, green, which are what people (at least in the West) will usually think of as the basic colours - black, white, grey and perhaps brown would be uncontroversial additions to the list. There'd be a few problems with translating that to other languages - famously, lots of Asian languages use the same word for what we'd call blue and green - but it's a reasonable start. Alternatively, if we don't want to make any decision about what "basic" means, we can use the standard anthropological list of "basic colours", from Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution - for English, that's black, white, grey, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, orange, pink and purple. There are scientific papers examining the basic colour terms in lots of languages, so it wouldn't be too hard to adapt for other languages. Smurrayinchester (talk) 10:29, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Template:list:basic colors/ja (for instance) doesn't have to be a word-for-word translation of Template:list:basic colors/en, does it? If a language has the same word for blue and green, just leave that word.

Also, "black,‎ blue,‎ brown,‎ gray,‎ green,‎ orange,‎ pink,‎ purple,‎ red,‎ white,‎ yellow" looks perfect. (I added pink and brown to the template now) Are there any colors whose presence or absence in a "basic list" in English would be controversial, really? I'm not thinking of any. --Daniel 11:55, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Keep. See w:Color_term#Basic_color_terms for a description of how basic colors work. This is a useful category for people interested in basic colors in various languages. --BB12 (talk) 09:25, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

• Kept for no consensus. --ElisaVan (talk) 14:35, 31 October 2013 (UTC)