Re: Color Terms

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