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English also has Azure, Denim and Cyan.


The sky is blue. The flag is red, white and blue.

To a Russian speaker, calling these colors by the same name seems absurd.


well, arguably, navy versus cornflower would handily cover pedantic differentiation, as needed.

put another way, one can easily counter that the flag and the sky handily share similar saturation of the same hue, differentiated only by the value of darkness.

take it one step further, and the sky at dusk will drop its brightness, and even if only for a moment, match the flag’s deeper blue, until the sun completely sets and the night sky becomes black, when not contaminated by light pollution.


My point was that, the way the language is actually used by its speakers, "blue" is more general than either of its two Russian translations.


The color of the sky varies dramatically depending on weather conditions, time of day, and which part of the sky you look at.

Even if you limit the discussion to cloudless skies between an hour after dawn to an hour before dusk, there is extreme variation.


It does (also turquoise and others), however I found that unless someone worked with color, or visual media, painting, graphic design etc. they won't use those names in colloquial speech.

"Did you see that cyan car that drove by?" is not something the majority of people in US might say while in Russia they will use the adjective goluboy and would say it is a completely different color from dark blue.


Cyan is the color of a colorful medium-lightness pure blue, possibly very slightly greenish in hue, as seen among the primary inks on a 4-color printing press. E.g. the color labeled C in https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/CMYK_sub...

Printers needed a technical term for this color which they wanted to distinguish from common blue pigments used in painting so they pulled the Greek word for blue.

It shouldn’t be used to refer to a broader color category, and definitely should not be used to refer to blue–green colors. For that stick to blue–green, greenish blue, or teal.

Similarly magenta is a colorful moderately purplish red color, again of medium lightness (named for a famously bloody battle). Again printers adopted this as a technical term because it is a bit different than the “red” pigments commonly used in painting.

The names “cyan” and “magenta” really should not be used to refer to additive mixtures like sRGB #00FFFF or #FF00FF. These colors are unrecognizably far away from printing ink colors.


In Russian goluboy is seen as a "primary" colour though.


And cobalt and sapphire. :)




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