Re: Alien colour spaces and stuff

Javier BF wrote:

>
>>From the data you've just provided, I would infere
> that Sangari and Zireen vision consists of 8 basic pure
> colour percepts organized into 4 axes: black-to-white,
> green-or-violet, yellow-or-turquoise, indigo-or-ultraviolet.
> I would guess that the green/violet was the first colour
> distinction to have appeared in the evolution of their
> chromatic vision, by splitting the original light/no-light
> photorreceptors into low-freq (green) and high-freq (violet)
> specialized ones, with white and black becoming "phantom"
> percepts produced by the combination of data from both.
I think this is a reasonable assumption. I put together a color chart of
the basic Tirelat colors; I had to create a couple of new words for some
of the secondary and tertiary colors, and reassign some of the existing
color words, but it seems to work pretty well.

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/png/new-tirelat-colors.png

So "ziimi" (green) and "zhuli" (violet) would be basic colors, somewhat
like yellow and blue to humans. Yellow and turquoise would be like red
and green. I put together another version of the color chart to try to
get an idea of what the colors actually look like to Sangari eyes. Of
course, that's not entirely possible, but at least a rough approximation
seems to be possible. It's like trying to get a feel for the shape of a
hypercube from looking at a three-dimensional projection printed on a
two-dimensional sheet of paper.

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/png/new-tirelat-colors-2.png

The new colors are "xeni" (yellow + indigo), "myri" (turquoise +
ultraviolet), and "veli" (yellow, turquoise, and indigo). I used
existing words for the other colors; e.g., "zaari" (blue + ultraviolet)
was a word for "sky blue", and "zafi" meant "pink" or "lavender".