lpetrich
Contributor
That's a function of technology, I'm sure. An increased quantity of generic color words is a result of advancing technology, it seems, with that technology making possible the production of objects with many different colors. Japan was pretty much in the Middle Ages until the 1868 Meiji Restoration, when a clique of modernizers started a big catch-up effort. So being behind in generic color words is not surprising.It's also interesting that the Japanese language only recently acquired a word for green, where they used the word for blue for both blue and green before.