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

From:Michael Poxon <m.poxon@...>
Date:Thursday, April 22, 2004, 17:48
This just isn't how it works! A colour term does not represent one standard
colour. Just because the same term is used to refer to the colour
of the sky and the colour of grass only means that in such a language the
term for blue (or green) has a wider breadth of what we would call the
spectrum than in our own language. Often a "colour" term relates to not only
the 'wavelength colour' but is inseparable from the material.
Hawaiian has a whole heap of these types of colour terms for instance. A
particular favourite of mine is a'a which is used not only to describe black
clinkery lava
but also is the Hawaiian name of the bright (white!) star Sirius.
Mike


> > "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.