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

--On Thursday, April 22, 2004 2:46 AM -0700 Philippe Caquant
<herodote92@...> wrote:

> "Blue" is probably important for every human being
> because every human being happens to look at the sky.
> The problem is: why is it in some languages confused
> with green ? Green is very common (nearly) everywhere
> because of the vegetation. It looks very difficult to
> call the color of mid-day sky by the same name as the
> colour of grass, and I don't think that there are
> whole populations suffering from a vision default.
> Maybe it is just a default-colour: what is neither
> red, neither yellow, neither white or black, is some
> kind of vague color ranging from azure to boiled
> spinach, and it applies to the sky at different
> moments of the day, as well as to the sea and to
> plants ? Maybe also people noticed that the color of
> the sky changed, so when you said "the color of the
> sky", it already naturally referred to a wide range of
> nuances - which is not the case for a (ripe) orange.
> (That's just a ad hoc and a priori theory, of course,
> one should make detailed inquiries about natives to
> confirm or infirm it).
They're not "confusing" blue with green any more than English speakers are
"confusing" goluboj and sinij. There is no physical or physiological way
that we divide up the color spectrum one way or another, which is part of
the reason these universals are so interesting. Green and blue are adjacent
to one another on the spectrum, and these languages simply draw the lines
differently. It actually was originally hypothesized that these "primitive"
peoples suffered from inferior perception abilities, but tests later showed
that they can distinguish colors just as well as anyone else.

Years of cultural immersion have forced us to think of colors in the terms
of the language(s) we know, and we wonder how others can not make the
distinction linguistically between the colors that we do. Perhaps Sapir and
Whorf were sort of right after all.

I guess I can sort of see how these colors could be covered under one term
(which some linguists call "grue"), especially considering all the
borderline cases that are not quite green and not quite blue. It's also
hard to imagine many situations in a primitive lifestyle in which it would
be necessary to make a distinction between green and blue. Plants are grue,
lizards are grue, water is grue, and the sky is grue, but not much else in
nature is grue.

Levi Tooker
lrtooker@buffalo.edu