Re: NATLANG: Colours

Also "qing" is prominent in Chinese, which refers to a
(perhaps more beautiful) bluish-green color, coming
from fired pottery glazes (I think).  Its only natural
that (in the days before PANTONE and CMYK, and
spectrographic analysis) that different cultural
concepts about 'what exactly is "green"' won't exactly
match up with another.

This is related to Chomskys? points about terms, and
how '"water" with a little "tea" in it is "tea," and
even though "tea" may contain a greater proportion of
"water" than the "river" flowing outside: the "river"
might have only 2 percent "water" left in it, but we
still call it "river"! ... That "water equals H20" is
a kind of dogma in the English language, where we what
we learn is useful for the description of things
within normal (to us) contexts, even if its means that
its almost entirely *detached from a literal or more
narrow description.'

So terms dont do anything to tell you what things are
- only that such a term and a general concept (like a
color) are somehow connected.  My concept of "red"
will never exactly match a perfect spectrographically
"pure" sample of "red," but it does'nt really matter -
different languages have different concepts of what
"red" is, and most developed variants are just
practical placeholders with nothing to do with
scientific notions anyway.

Western notions are after all, just one (large,
swarming) view of the world.

-SC
















--- "Mark P. Line" <mark@...> wrote:
> Michael Poxon said:
> > I seem to remember one PNG language that had no
> "what we would call"
> > colour
> > terms, but simply two terms for 'light' and
> 'dark'.
>
>
> That would be Dani, which is one of the languages
> used in the original
> studies that _established_ the purported color
> naming universals.
>
>
> -- Mark


	
		
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