Re: NATLANG: Colours

>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.
No. You are mixing two aspects here: the salience of red
in absolute terms, and the relative salience of the red
and yellow components in fire. I first said: the fact of
red being salient (in absolute terms) can be justified by
the fact that a red component is common to and is useful
for identifying several very salient things/phenomena (blood,
physical/emotional states, etc.). *Then*, that salience
of the percept red in absolute terms, which has not been
determined circularly by red appearing in fire but because
of red being *common* to salient things/phenomena like fire,
blood, etc., then that fact of red *already* being salient
in itself because of said reason makes the yellow component
in fire look less salient than the red component, and
therefore the red component takes precedence in a
representative abstraction. If instead it were yellow the
common factor to very salient things like blood, fire, etc.,
then yellow would be the most salient in itself and then
it would be yellow the component that would override the
red component in the colour of fire


>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.
You keep claiming that I'm making ethnocentric assumptions.
Where do you find the ethnocentric assumption in the
*objective facts* of blood being red, fire having reddish
tinges, a metal reddening when hot and a reddened face
being the signal of physical or emotional states (anger,
fever, embarrasment, etc.), which is what I have offered
as very good *objective* and thus *culturally-neutral*
reasons for red to be a salient colour for humans?

Besides, I have also mentioned that we also have the fact
that 'primitive' non-Western languages with only 3 colour
terms have precisely the one for red and not the one for
blue or the one for yellow, which is proof that the
salience of red is not merely an ethnocentric assumption
of us Westerners.

Cheers,
Javier