TENNIS BALLS AND LANGUAGE. Koren suggests a couple possible explanations for the yellow/green dispute.
The first explanation is that the problem is one of language. She quotes a scientist: “language systems of people in cultures with little exposure to industrialization are pretty poor at communicating yellow.” And what about green? “We are generally really bad, across all cultures, in communicating green,”
I have often posted, including here, on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, “which holds that the language that a person speaks influences the way a person conceptualizes their world. The obvious example of this is that people have trouble distinguishing between colors if their language does not have a word for that color.”