Re: Quest for colours: what's basic then?

Might as well chime in about what a non-human hominid interpretation of
color might be.

The retinas of Techs (I have now officially changed the name of the Techians
as individuals to Techs; Techia is the name of the ethnic collective) have
rods which detect brightness and darkness like humans, but unlike humans
which have two kinds of cones, they have three types of cones, one for each
primary light color: red, green and blue. This is leading me to think of how
many 'basic' colors could exist.

A binary system, using all or nothing of each primary color, would produce
eight colors: black, red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta, white. A
trinary system, using the amounts 0%, 50% or 100% of each color, would make
twenty-seven, including orange, pink, sky blue, gray, dark red, dark green,
navy blue, violet, lavender and others. Either I'll use a RBG system or a
hue-brightness-saturation system to come up with a list of basic color
words. But I have to actually derive color adjectives, which would
fundamentally be their own class of verbs (like Arabic class IX).

This discussion has given me something new to work on, since other interests
of mine are color theory as well as music theory and mathematics.

Reply