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Re: Alien colour spaces and stuff

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Sunday, March 7, 2004, 0:56
Javier BF wrote:

>>>Are their eyes tetrachromatic like those of most birds, too? >> >>They're closely related to Zireen, and have pretty much the same range >>of color vision. They can't see red, but they see into the ultraviolet >>range; their primary colors are yellow, turquoise, indigo, and >>ultraviolet. "Green" is a secondary color produced by combining yellow >>and turquoise. > > > I assume that by primary and secondary colors you refer > to the composition of retinal stimuli. But what are their > basic, unmixed colour percepts? I mean, in humans "yellow" > is experienced as a completely basic, pure, unmixed colour > percept, even though it is produced by stimulating both > the S and M cones, that is, even though it is the result > of a secondary retinal stimulus. The same goes for "white", > which is the epitome of purity even though it is produced > by a tertiary retinal stimulus combining S, M and L cones. > Let alone black, which is the colour percept caused by > the lack of retinal stimulus.
That's something I haven't thought much about; it's hard enough to imagine "turquoise" as a primary color, let alone which combinations of colors would be perceived as "basic". I've tried to get some ideas of what color looks like to them by hue-shifting pictures in Paint Shop Pro, but it's still not something I have a good intuitive sense for.
> Of course, labels like "turquoise" and "violet" for the > Sangari/Zireen basic colours in the above schemes (as well > as "orange" and "pink" for the extra percepts of mutant > tetrachromat women) are misleading, since for us humans > "turquoise" doesn't refer to a basic colour percept at all, > but to one of our four binary hues (orange, yellowgreen, > turquoise and purple)(*), a chromatic perception consisting > of green and blue percepts experienced simultaneously. > While the "turquoise" of the Sangari/Zireen would be > supposed to be experienced as a pure, basic, unmixed > percept, independent of the human colour percepts of > green and blue, and thus with little to do with what > we humans think of as turquoise.
Yes, while on the other hand the color translated as "blue" is perceived as a mixture of turquoise and indigo, and not a pure color. And I'm going to have to get rid of the word for "red", since they can't perceive red light. (Tirelat was originally a personal language before I revived it as a Sangari language, and I haven't got around to fixing the color vocabulary.) Or I could recycle "red" and use it for one of those indescribable Zireen/Sangari "basic" hues.