Re: Color Terms

Ed Heil wrote:
> So if your aliens had more than three types of
> cone cell (or the equivalent), or if those cells had different curves
> of receptivity along the spectrum, they would engender a different
> bodily experience of "basic" colors and thus a different array basic
> color terms -- an entirely likely situation!
Or, if they had only rods, they could have a whole range of shades of
grey.  I haven't worked out color terms in Watakass=ED, but they'd
definitely be quite different from human langs - their eyes are
receptive to near-ultraviolet, having four types of cones.  The
low-frequency limit is in what we'd consider redish-orange, so that our
red (the focus of red) would probably appear black to them.

> they also demonstrated a very subtle but measurable
> "Sapir-Whorf Effect" in color perception -- if people (for example)
> have different words for Blue and Green, they tend to perceive a
> bluish-green chip and a greenish-blue chip as more unlike each other
> than if they only have a single word for blue-and-green.
But, you've got to wonder about those experiments.  As I understood it,
the researchers just told the subjects to pick out the two that were
most similar, without explaining it further, they were the same size,
shape, etc., so only color differentiated them.  What probably happened
is that the subjects thought to themselves "well, I guess I'd call these
two the same color, so I'll pick them".

--=20
"[H]e axed after eggys: And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude not
speke no Frenshe ... And then at last a nother sayd that he woulde haue
hadde eyren: then the goode wyf sayd that she vnderstood hym wel." --
William Caxton
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