Re: Color Terms

Well, the human "basic color term" foci seem to be located at places
in the spectrum where firing for red, green, or blue cone cells
maximizes, minimizes, or where different combinations of those three
maximize or minimize.  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!

(more fun color-term trivia)

By the way, Kay and Kempton, some of the original color-terms
researchers, not only demonstrated that there is a strong universality
to human color experience despite varying color terms in different
languages, 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.  (At least,
that's how I remember it -- I may be confabulating it to be simpler
than it was.  I read a description of the experiment in George
Lakoff's _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_).

So as with most great questions, the answer to "does our language
control how we view the world?" is "yes and no."  In the area of color
perception, there is a very strong language-independent factor, and a
more subtle but measurable language-dependent factor.

Ed Heil ------------------------------- edheil@postmark.net

Herman Miller wrote:

> On Mon, 26 Jul 1999 21:44:57 -0600, Ed Heil <edheil@...> wrote:
>
> >It seems that there are eleven basic focal colors that humans all
> >consider independent and perceptually salient.  Even when a language
> >has a term that covers more than one of these colors, e.g. a term
> >which includes blue and green, speakers of that language do *not* tend
> >to choose a blue-green color as a good representative of that term; on
> >the contrary they choose a blue or a green; and not just any blue or
> >green, but the exact blue or green that a speaker of English or French
> >would call "blue" or "bleu" or "green" or "vert"!
>
> Interesting. Jarrda seems to violate these rules, with 17 basic words for
> colors. The English equivalents are, more or less: red, coppery (incl.
> brown), orange, gold, yellow, lime, green, turquoise, cyan, azure, indigo,
> violet, magenta, rose (incl. pink), white, gray, black. But then, Jarrda
> speakers are non-human. As originally designed, only the colors red,
> yellow, green, and blue were considered primary. However, "rul", the word
> for "azure", started being used as the more generic counterpart of English
> "blue", and the original word for "blue" became specialized to mean
> "indigo". A basic root for "orange" also replaced the compound
> "red-yellow", but the word for "brown" is still considered a shade of
> orange-red. So even eliminating the rare secondary colors (lime,
> turquoise), Jarrda still doesn't quite follow the pattern of human
> languages, since "brown" is supposed to be more basic than "orange" or
> "gray".
>
> Tirelat, on the other hand, has 11 basic colors that are very similar to
> the 11 colors in the study, except that "pink" is included under "magenta".
>
> --
> languages of Kolagia---> +---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>---
>       Thryomanes        /"If all Printers were determin'd not to print any
>    (Herman Miller)     / thing till they were sure it would offend no body,
>    moc.oi @ rellimh <-/  there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin
>