Re: Nimrina colors updated

--- Herman Miller wrote:
>Technically, you could say that "tavla" is the color that I perceive when I
>look at the lowest circle on the Nimrina color chart on my monitor. (...) I
>could just say "tavla" = "green" and leave it at that. Nimrina speakers are
>close enough to human that they probably perceive similar colors. But if I
>want a better definition of specifically what kind of "green" is considered
>the most basic or prototypical "tavla", English words are inadequate.
IME "prototypical colors" are greitly subjectiv. I've recently thought that
maybe a more exact approach would be to use "color density" charted over
colorspace...

To keep things simple, let's say each word's definition consists of 3 levels
- a core of "prototypical C", surrounded by layers of "hue of C" and
"C-hued". You'd first have the various-sized blobs of "prototypical" colors
scattered 'round the area much in the same way you have exact hues on your
current color maps, only with small margins in the color rather than strict
single colors - the primaries probably *smaller* than secondaries. (Deciding
on a stereotypical black is trivial, but different people probably have
vastly different ideas on what's a stereotypical pink.)

Some secondary (and all tertiary) "prototypes" would likely end up partially
or wholly overlapping with the "hue of" regions of various primaries, eg.
English "indigo" can be seen as a hue of "blue" or "purple", and thus
"prototypical indigo" would have to overlap with both "hue of blue" and "hue
of purple" in this system.

To wrap things up, no "hue of" layers could be left as the only descriptions
of any colorspace point - they would also have to be in the "C-hued" area of
some other (probably nearest primary) color. Obviously if something _isn't_
a pure / stereotypical color, it has to be tinted with something else, no?
Again, I suspect this zone would be the largest for primaries but smaller
for others.

I could rant on about how this system could be used to define exactly
whether a color is primary, secondary or tertiary, but I'll put this up for
commenting first...

Oh yes, and I imagine illustrating this sort of a color map would be damned
difficult. You'd probably need either LOTS of 2D color maps, or a few good
fully 3D ones...

John Vertical