Re: NATLANG: Colours

>Yes, but I meant I cannot see which one should be more
>important (which one should be the referent one)
>between Russian "goluboj" and "sinij". They just are
>two different colours, that's all. But when I'm think
>of "red" against "pink", I have a tendency to think
>that "pink" is some variety of "red" (even in Russian:
>krasnij # rozovij)
How come? I think it's clear that a category centered
on a simple, basic percept of human vision as BLUE should
be more important than a category centered on a composite,
more complex and thus less basic perception as BLUE+WHITE.
It's the same thing as RED ("red") vs. RED+WHITE ("pink"),
and it's also why the first linguistic categorizations
of colour perceptions are those centered around the six
basic percepts: WHITE, BLACK, RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE,
further divisions for composite perceptions arising later.
Also, RED is a more salient percept than BLUE, so a
linguistic category for RED arises sooner than one for
BLUE, and further divisions within the range of visual
perceptions that include the percept RED are more likely
to derive into independent linguistic categories than
further divisions withing the range of visual perceptions
that include BLUE, and so linguistic categories for colours
like "brown", "purple", "orange" and "pink" as independent
from the category of plain "red" are more common than
categories for colours like "azure", "navy" or "turquoise"
as independent from plain "blue".

Cheers,
Javier

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