Re: Colors in Sherall

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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