Re: NATLANG: Colours

¡>> Yes, but the fact is that usually there is much less
>> red in our environment than blue or green for ex. Thus
>> red carries attention. And as fire and blood are red,
>> it often carries attention in a dramatic way.
>
>I believe that the "redness" of fire is a cultural construct. Most fires
>in a natural environment have at least as much orange and yellow in them
>as red.
Is Mars _red_? I'd say it is actually orangish, isn't
it? The same for red hair, which is orange in fact.

"Redness" here must be understood in a broad sense,
that is, to the presence of the percept RED and not
just to that fraction of the domain of RED to which
the meaning of "red" has been reduced in modern usage
(except for a few fossilized expressions like the above).
Anciently, said broad sense was the one covered by the
Basque word for red, "gorri", which could be applied
for example to brown cows and orange mushrooms as well
as to the colour of blood; and I think expressions
such as "red hair" reveal that English "red" had also
a similar broad meaning in the past, when pure colours
were not so readily available and ubiquitous as they
are in today's industrialized world and when basic
colour terms were fewer and had a broader meaning.

Orange is a colour with a red component and the scene
of a fire acquires with its presence a definite reddish
tinge - sure, not _pure_ red, just _reddishness_. Red
hair is orange as well, not pure red, but what seems
more relevant in its colour is that there is RED, not
that there is also YELLOW - the same can be applied to
the colour of a fire and to the colour of Mars.

Saying that "fire is red" is making an abstraction where
only the most salient/defining features/elements are kept,
in this case, the presence of the colour percept RED,
identified by the word "red" since "red" is the category
centered on the pure appearance of that percept. If you
draw a fire and paint it only in yellow, most probably it
won't really look like a fire unless you point out: "This
yellow thing I have drawn here _is_ a fire". But once you
add in some reddish tinges here and there, it suddenly
becomes obvious that the thing in the picture is a fire.
And if you painted it only in red, it would still be
easily identified as a fire without any help, even though
it could be objected to as an unrealistic depiction.


>Fresh blood is indeed red, briefly, but relating that fact to
>color naming "universals" seems awfully tenuous.
That fact of blood being red is related to the salience
of the RED percept. Then, that languages would tend to
categorize first those elements of human experience that
are perceived as more salient seems to me reasonable.


>> This is all of course a theory, but it doens't look
>> completely insane. It doesn't shock me anyway.
>
>It's not insane or shocking, just empirically unjustified (AFAIK).
Is the objective fact that the percept RED is perceived
in such salient elements as fire, blood, hot metals and
angry/excited/embarrassed/feverish/exhausted human faces
not enough empirical reason to make red a salient colour?
I do think those are good and enough reasons.

Cheers,
Javier

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