What impacts words for colors? Why don't some people separate blue and green?
smo[
....
Color is a spectrum: Red fades from orange to yellow, whereas green merges to turquoise, then blue. Languages treat this spectrum in different ways: Some have separate words for “green” and “blue,” others lump the two together. Some barely bother with color terms at all.
“The question is, why?” says Dan Dediu, an evolutionary linguist at Lumière University Lyon 2. Now, he and his colleagues have found evidence for an unexpected answer: People with more exposure to sunlight are more likely to speak languages that lump green and blue together, under a term that linguists dub “grue.” That’s because of the effects of a lifetime of light exposure, the team speculates: Lots of Sun causes a condition called “lens brunescence” that makes it harder to distinguish the two hues.
...