Re: NATLANG: Colours

Philippe Caquant said:

> Yes, but the fact is that usually there is much less
> red in our environment than blue or green for ex. Thus
> red carries attention. And as fire and blood are red,
> it often carries attention in a dramatic way.
I believe that the "redness" of fire is a cultural construct. Most fires
in a natural environment have at least as much orange and yellow in them
as red. Fresh blood is indeed red, briefly, but relating that fact to
color naming "universals" seems awfully tenuous.


> In our
> cultures we made that feeling even much stronger,
> associating red with traffic lights (if you cross
> over, it's at the risk of your life), and with
> communism for ex (with is, as everybody knows, the
> more terrible thing man can conceive). Why did we
> choose "red" to mean "danger" ? Is is totally
> arbitrary ?
I believe it's a metaphor. Metaphors are seldom completely arbitrary, but
I don't think they're ever universal, either.


> 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).


-- Mark

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