inkstains

I just... don't understand what your concern about this is, honestly. Some specialists decided that this was an important distinction to make, and some laypeople use their terminology while others don't. All words are just symbols, with no actual truth behind them. It's like getting upset if people with physics backgrounds use "mass" instead of "weight", because "weight" for them symbolises something slightly differently.


if the local language calls them white, then we will call them white by the language of the country they came from.

...I can't parse this sentence. You make it sound like you'd call Italian white horses "bianco horses"...?


Well. There's only one sort of polar bear (plus albino-ism, maybe?): black-skinned, white-furred. And no one breeds polar bears. So (a) you don't need to designate between colours of polar bears in the first place (if I say "polar bear" you imagine a black-skinned, white-furred polar bear -- I don't need to say "white polar bear"), (b) there aren't any white-furred nonblack-skinned polar bears to distinguish against (other than albinos, and you'd say "albino polar bear" for that), and (c) there's no money or reputation on the line regarding their colour.

Whereas: (a) there are a lot of different horse coat colours, (b) there is a distinction between white-haired pink-skinned and white-haired grey-skinned, and (c) there is money and reputation associated with breeding white or grey horses.

These two situations aren't really compatible for logical argument.