Maybe your version of blue is my version of brown or red? We would never know and there's no way I could think of to prove or disprove it. Any ideas?

A cross-cultural study reveals how language shapes color perception.
The research on English children and children in seminomadic Namibian tribes appeared in the December issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Vol. 133, No. 4). Cognitive psychologist Akira Miyake, PhD, of the University of Toronto, says that the study "addresses an age-old question: To what extent does language shape or even determine the way we think?"

The study tracked color naming, comprehension and memory in two populations over three years.
Across cultures, the children acquired color terms the same way: They gradually and with some effort moved from an uncategorized organization of color, based on a continuum of perceptual similarity, to structured categories that varied across languages and cultures. Over time, language wielded increasing influence on how children categorized and remembered colors.

In short, the range of stimuli that for Himba speakers comes to be categorized as "serandu" would be categorized in English as red, orange or pink. As another example, Himba children come to use one word, "zoozu," to embrace a variety of dark colors that English speakers would call dark blue, dark green, dark brown, dark purple, dark red or black.

True colors
Not only has no evidence emerged to link the 11 basic English colors to the visual system, but the English-Himba data support the theory that color terms are learned relative to language and culture.

...the authors say that as both Himba and English children started learning their cultures' color terms, the link between color memory and color language increased. Their rapid perceptual divergence once they acquired color terms strongly suggests that cognitive color categories are learned rather than innate, according to the authors.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb05/hues.aspx

When you look at the following colors, typical native English speaking respondents will describe these two colors as existing with the range of colors we call "blue".
(Dark Blue Image) (Light Blue Image)
If one looks at other languages, this same categorization scheme is not evident. For example, the blues above are distinct color categories in Russian.
Plain or dark blue (siniy) is a distinct color from light blue (goluboy). Each of these color categories has its own associated meanings, invoking a specific thought for many Russians.
http://boingboing.net/2010/06/27/seeing-languages-dif.html

In 1976 Paul Kay, a University of California, Berkeley linguistics professor, led a team of researchers in collecting color terms used by 110 different languages around the world. Reexamining these data in 2006, Delwin Lindsey and Angela Brown of Ohio State University, Columbus discovered that most languages in this study do not make a distinction between green and blue. Further, the closer the homeland of a language group is to the equator the less likely they are to distinguish between green and blue.
http://anthro.palomar.edu/language/language_5.htm

Cross-Cultural Studies of Color Naming, Categorization and Cognition.
http://aris.ss.uci.edu/~kjameson/CrossCultural.html

Anthropology of Color
The field of color categorization has always been intrinsically multi- and inter-disciplinary, since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The editors have put great effort into bringing together research from anthropology, linguistics, psychology, semiotics, and a variety of other fields, by promoting the exploration of the different but interacting and complementary ways in which these various perspectives model the domain of color experience. By so doing, they significantly promote the emergence of a coherent field of the anthropology of color.
http://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/z.137

And only the 3 basic colors can be mixed up theoretically, R G B, because those 3 require eye recepters known as cones.

The primary colours are actually RYB because G can be made by mixing Y&B

The Additive Primary colours are Red, Green and Blue.
Additive colours are colours that are associated with emitted light directly from a source before an object reflects the light. These colours are red, green and blue - (RGB). These are the colours we are probably most familiar with in association with television, and computer displays.
If all three of the additive colours were combined together in the form of light, they would produce white.


The Subtractive Primary colours are Red, Yellow and Blue.
Subtractive colours are colours that are associated with reflected light. In this case the subtractive colours are red, yellow and blue (RYB). These are the colours we are probably most familiar with the as the primary colours from school.

These colours are associated with the subtraction of light and used in pigments for making paints, inks, coloured fabrics, and general coloured coatings that we see and use every day.

If all three of the subtractive primary colours were combined together, they would produce black.
http://www.colourtherapyhealing.com/colour/primary_colours.php