Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Alien colour spaces and stuff

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Monday, March 8, 2004, 6:27
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".