I think it's a cultural/developmental/language thing rather than anything to do with the RGB colour space or human perception.

The words for colours are closely related to things, the most obvious example is "orange". I think you can have a dark yellow, it's just that we call it something different. Why? Perhaps because there are objects which are naturally dark yellow - olives! There may be fewer reasons to distinguish between dark red and light red, so the same word is used. However, if for reasons of survival you need to know to pick the yellow fruit but not the olive coloured fruit, it helps to have different words for these colours to avoid confusion.

In short I believe we came to name colours based on convenience, not as some orderly partition of the perceivable colour space.

Note I'm not an anthropologist or etymologist so this is pure conjecture on my part!

I think it's a cultural/developmental/language thing rather than anything to do with the RGB colour space or human perception.

The words for colours are closely related to things, the most obvious example is "orange". I think you can have a dark yellow, it's just that we call it something different. Why? Perhaps because there are objects which are naturally dark yellow - olives! There may be fewer reasons to distinguish between dark red and light red, so the same word is used. However, if for reasons of survival you need to know to pick the yellow fruit but not the olive coloured fruit, it helps to have different words for these colours to avoid confusion.

In short I believe we came to name colours based on convenience, not as some orderly partition of the perceivable colour space.

Note I'm not an anthropologist or etymologist so this is pure conjecture on my part!

There is almost certainly a perception component as well, colours we can distinguish between more easily deserve unique names, whilst there's no point naming colour we can't see very well...

I think it's a cultural/developmental/language thing rather than anything to do with the RGB colour space or human perception.

The words for colours are closely related to things, the most obvious example is "orange". I think you can have a dark yellow, it's just that we call it something different. Why? Perhaps because there are objects which are naturally dark yellow - olives! There may be fewer reasons to distinguish between dark red and light red, so the same word is used. However, if for reasons of survival you need to know to pick the yellow fruit but not the olive coloured fruit, it helps to have different words for these colours to avoid confusion.

Note I'm not an anthropologist or etymologist so this is pure conjecture on my part!

I think it's a cultural/developmental/language thing rather than anything to do with the RGB colour space or human perception.

The words for colours are closely related to things, the most obvious example is "orange". I think you can have a dark yellow, it's just that we call it something different. Why? Perhaps because there are objects which are naturally dark yellow - olives! There may be fewer reasons to distinguish between dark red and light red, so the same word is used. However, if for reasons of survival you need to know to pick the yellow fruit but not the olive coloured fruit, it helps to have different words for these colours to avoid confusion.

In short I believe we came to name colours based on convenience, not as some orderly partition of the perceivable colour space.

Note I'm not an anthropologist or etymologist so this is pure conjecture on my part!