Re: NATLANG: Colours

Javier BF said:
>
> Saying that "fire is red" is making an abstraction where
> only the most salient/defining features/elements are kept,
> in this case, the presence of the colour percept RED,
> identified by the word "red" since "red" is the category
> centered on the pure appearance of that percept.
Earlier, you were saying that RED is an early basic color because it's
more salient than other colors, and I was asking how we can pretend to
know that RED is necessarily more salient.

Here, you're responding to that complaint by saying that RED is more
salient than other colors because RED is a basic color.


> If you
> draw a fire and paint it only in yellow, most probably it
> won't really look like a fire unless you point out: "This
> yellow thing I have drawn here _is_ a fire". But once you
> add in some reddish tinges here and there, it suddenly
> becomes obvious that the thing in the picture is a fire.
> And if you painted it only in red, it would still be
> easily identified as a fire without any help, even though
> it could be objected to as an unrealistic depiction.
Have you tried that cross-culturally? (I'm talking Papua, not France.)


>>Fresh blood is indeed red, briefly, but relating that fact to
>>color naming "universals" seems awfully tenuous.
>
> That fact of blood being red is related to the salience
> of the RED percept. Then, that languages would tend to
> categorize first those elements of human experience that
> are perceived as more salient seems to me reasonable.
Lots of things are reasonable. I'm questioning whether or not we actually
know one way or the other.


>>> This is all of course a theory, but it doens't look
>>> completely insane. It doesn't shock me anyway.
>>
>>It's not insane or shocking, just empirically unjustified (AFAIK).
>
> Is the objective fact that the percept RED is perceived
> in such salient elements as fire, blood, hot metals and
> angry/excited/embarrassed/feverish/exhausted human faces
> not enough empirical reason to make red a salient colour?
> I do think those are good and enough reasons.
I've not seen any reports of the "objective fact" you mention that have a
wide enough cross-cultural database to qualify as a good reason for
anything purporting to drive human universals. Why would I want to
_assume_, for purposes of studying human universals, that every human in
every culture/language will necessarily perceive fire as RED in the first
instance -- and assume that so forcefully that it becomes an "objective
fact" for me? You can extend that complaint to the derived assumptions
being made about how salient certain colors are with respect to other
colors. I just don't see any solid cross-cultural evidence to support such
assumptions, no matter how reasonable they might seem to me as a
middle-class American. (It seems reasonable to buy sneakers at the mall,
but I don't think it would seem reasonable to every human in every culture
on the planet.)

To work in the area of human universals, we have to work very hard at
casting aside as much of our ethnocentric interference as possible. That
can never be done completely, but not realizing the force of this
interference represents an impervious barrier to progress (as in the
19th-century grammar of Herero with four "cases" like German, mentioned in
another post).


-- Mark