laso

laso talks about both blues and greens at the same time. it can describe a large range of colors that are often separated in other languages, such as English. In English, blue and green are separate concepts with their own semantic space. In Toki Pona (as well as countless languages across the world), these concepts are merged into one. Many linguists affectionally call this color "grue" in the contexts of analyzing other languages, and the term can be helpful here because it gives an anchor for color perspective to English speakers. How often is it crucial to distinguish between blue and green? In cases where one may wish to do so, greens are yellower than blues, so it's easy to modify laso with a word like "jelo" to specify that, but if you don't need to specify, doing so adds more clutter to your speaking. Because cool colors like blue and green tend to be darker than warm colors, speakers have different cutoff points before they'd switch to using pimeja as blues and greens get darker.

Another part of laso worth mentioning is purples. While somewhat controversial, when showed color chips (the kind you use when choosing which color to paint your wall), Toki Pona speakers unanimously identified most of the darker or bluer shades of purple that were not dark enough to be pimeja as laso. Some of the lighter or pinker ones were called loje. There was also some overlap, and some people stated the importance of the surrounding colors. (This was an informal test at a Toki Pona meetup, so consider it ethnographic and nonobjective.) These are all things to keep in mind when you encounter a color that seems hard to talk about in Toki Pona.