cyan and magenta should be basic color terms

Or we could call them aqua and pink

English is said in Basic Color Terms to have eleven basic color terms:

1. black

2. white

3. red

4. green

5. yellow

6. blue

7. brown

8. orange

9. pink

10. purple

11. gray

I think most English speakers would find this to be a basically accurate list. These indeed seem like the basic color terms to me.

But personally, this list has always seemed weirdly arbitrary! Like, why does light red get a basic color term? Why dark orange? Red orange yellow green blue purple white black gray would at least sort of make sense: you commit to red yellow and blue as your primary colors, for some reason, then add in the secondaries, and also add in white, black, and gray. That would feel basically sensible. But for some reason there’s pink and brown!

But even if that would sort of make sense, nowadays we have modern color theory. Whether you’re doing additive, with primary RGB and secondary CMY, or subtractive, with primary CMY and secondary RGB, that's still the same set of primary and secondary colors. So that seems like it would be a great set to have as basic color terms!

But cyan and magenta are, for some reason, not really widely considered basic color terms! Cyan and magenta are really niche compared to orange and purple, for some reason.

So the way I think of color in my hess has ended up using a list sort of like this:

1. black

2. white

3. red

4. green

5. yellow

6. blue

7. brown

8. orange

9. pink, like for example hot pink, which is to say magenta

10. purple

11. gray

12. cyan

And I think this list is pretty solid. I’m mostly happy with it. I do sometimes feel for the forgotten tertiary colors beyond orange and purple — I don’t think those all even have consistent names¹¹ The color I habitually refer to as cyan is called aqua ny HTML and Deltarune. I don't think this particularly counts as much ambiguity, it’s not like there's any other color cyan could plausibly refer to. I guess Minecraft’s cyan is maybe sorta dark?

HTML also calls magenta fuchsia. (Why is fuchsia spelt like that. If it were fuschia I'd get it.). Azure²² Incredibly critical word in IPA Scrabble if you're not skilled enough to find a better usage of ʒ. is probably the one with the most consistent name. There’s also rose, seafoam green, and tennis ball.

But I think one can defend the primacy of orange and purple on the grounds of hue measured in degrees not actually perfectly corresponding to any sort of perceptually uniform color space. There's probably some Sapir–Whorfing afoot, but I do actually think it's probably a little tricker to split up lime green / seafoam green / cyan at a glance than to split up red / orange / yellow. Or at least, this doesn't seem like a totally ludicrous thing to propose to me.

One still is left thinking that brown is slightly unprincipled. I think what I’d say here is basically like, while brown is often phrased as being a sort of dark brown, it’s really broad enough to include dark and desaturated warm colors even if they’re on the redder or yellower end. So like, that’s sort of not a ridiculous thing to have even if you don’t want to have like, a dark and light version of very color as part of your main color set. But you might consider things like a tan or a beige about as justified as brown. And you might want to not leave out the cool end of the spectrum entirely — maybe you want to promote like, navy, or something.

But all those ideas are more speculative to me. Mostly I would like us to please promote cyan and magenta.