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Re: Colors in Sherall

From:Paul Roser <pkroser@...>
Date:Friday, June 6, 2003, 15:29
On Wed, 4 Jun 2003 22:59:54 -0400, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:

>Zireen eyes have color receptors that are sensitive to yellow, turquoise, >indigo, and ultraviolet. Zireen languages have distinct words for all the >secondary colors made by combining any two of the four primary colors >(examples from Karidhi): > >t`s`a? Y >zE~zO T >D}j I >mia U >laz Y T >j\iz`a Y I >t_>En Y U >BE? T I >nEvit T U >hO~ I U
This made me curious as to how Zireen colors would map to ours. From the above I assume that Zireen cannot see red (and presumably not orange either?), and we would perceive /mia/ as some shade of grey,black, or white, and /t_>En/ (is that an ejective?), /nEvit/, and /hO~/ as equivalent to /t`s`a?/, /zE~zo/, and /D}j/ respectively - and I can just see human xenolinguists doing all sorts of contortions trying to account for two sets of color names... So does focal /laz/ map to 'green-ish', and /j\iz`a/ map to some sort of 'blue-violet', or would /j\iz`a/ be more in the range of a 'puplish-brown'? (I'm looking for the focal, quintessential sort of color, assuming that common usage assigns a wide range of values to each term) Do they have any terms that cover combinations of more than two primaries? My understanding of human color perceptionis limited, but I intuit (perhaps wrongly) that R+G+B is perceived as something in the brownish or maroonish range, so I would imagine that Y+T+I or T+I+U would be analogous. --Bfowol

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Herman Miller <hmiller@...>