Re: Colors in Sherall

On Fri, 6 Jun 2003 11:29:59 -0400, Paul Roser <pkroser@...> wrote:

>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?),
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).

> 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.

> 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)
/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.

>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
These would be perceived as less saturated colors, and probably wouldn't be
basic color words in most Zireen languages, but they would have words for
them (I just don't know them yet).