Re: NATLANG: Colours
From: | Mark P. Line <mark@...> |
Date: | Saturday, April 24, 2004, 18:12 |
Javier BF said:
>>> Also, RED is a more salient percept than BLUE, so a
>>> linguistic category for RED arises sooner than one for
>>> BLUE,
>>
>>How is this salience determined?
>
> Intuition based on everyday experience, and experiments
> that confirm it.
Experiments that confirm that red is more salient than blue for all humans
as a hard-wired perceptual phenomenon, irrespective of language and
culture?
Or is it merely the case that red is intuitively more salient for the
researchers and their test subjects drawn from the researchers' own
cultural environment?
I don't have an opinion either way, it's just that I'm suspicious of
generalizations along the lines of "everybody knows that, it's intuitively
obvious" -- especially when we're talking about phenomena that are
supposed to be human universals.
-- Mark
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