Re: Colors in Sherall

On Sat, 7 Jun 2003 00:06:04 -0400, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:

>Zireen don't see as far into the red end of the spectrum as humans, and
>most colors we perceive as red would be invisible to them. Orange light
>would be perceived as a really dark yellow. Some colors we perceive as
>orange or yellow might even be seen as green, if they have red components
>that are beyond the range of Zireen vision (as on a computer monitor or TV
>screen).
>
>&gt; and we would perceive /mia/ as some shade of grey,black, or white,
>
>Mostly black (or dark shades of some other color, if not completely
>saturated), but some shades of /mia/ would be visible as violet.
>
>&gt; and /t_&gt;En/ (is that an ejective?), /nEvit/, and /hO~/ as equivalent to
>&gt;/t`s`a?/, /zE~zo/, and /D}j/ respectively - and I can just see human
>&gt;xenolinguists doing all sorts of contortions trying to account for two sets
>&gt;of color names... So does focal /laz/ map to 'green-ish', and /j\iz`a/ map
>&gt;to some sort of 'blue-violet', or would /j\iz`a/ be more in the range of a
>&gt;'puplish-brown'? (I'm looking for the focal, quintessential sort of color,
>&gt;assuming that common usage assigns a wide range of values to each term)
>
>/laz/ is essentially equivalent to green (and is used for the color of
>leaves, etc.); [j\iz`a] (phonemically /gira/) doesn't really have a good
>English equivalent, as it covers a range of colors that look different to
>humans, but we'd perceive the focal color as a shade of pink.
How did you reckon focal color for something like /gira/? Did you calculate the
average of the combined frequencies of Y & I?

Bfowol

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