Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: NATLANG: Colours

From:Javier BF <uaxuctum@...>
Date:Thursday, April 22, 2004, 9:56
>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

Replies

Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Mark P. Line <mark@...>