Re: Colors in Czirehlat

On Sat, 28 Jul 2001 05:22:33 EDT, David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>
wrote:

>Stage 6B.) If black doesn't split off, blue and green split up, leaving:
>White, Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, warm and cool.  (7 terms.)
This leaves yellowish brown, orange, and pink in the "warm" category, and
blackish brown, gray and purple in the "cool" category?

>Stage 9) [From here on it's fuzzy.]  Usually brown separates first, so it's
>its own term, so we have: Black, white, red, yellow, blue, green and brown.
>(7 terms)
>
>Stage 10) Gray is usually the next to go, so it becomes its own term.  (8
>terms)
That's probably the closest to the Czirehlat system if I want to go with a
"natural" model.

>    So, if realistic is what you're looking for, this is what's normal in
>color term development in natural languages.  A system with red, green, blue
>and yellow is highly unlikely.  It could be very likely with black and white,
>though, provided the "warm" and "cool" distinctions were disambiguated, the
>extraneous terms being attached to one of the six.
I was assuming black and white would be included.

>    There are a lot of people who see purple as a variety of blue.  I've
>found if you get a large group of English speakers together, they'd be hard
>pressed to decide on whether something is blue or purple (this happens a lot
>with my friends and I when we watch Laker games on TV.  We all know they're
>supposed to be purple, and in person they actually are, but those things
>really look blue).
I'm not familiar with what color Laker uniforms are. Could they be a hue
intermediate between the blue range and the purple range? Or a shade of
purple that isn't picked up well by TV cameras?

>    If you want to make the language look like a real language, the answer is
>no, you shouldn't add basic color terms; there are just the eleven.  But it's
>the latter part of this statement that interests me.  You know,
>super-saturated blue is NOT "basic blue", or focal blue.  Focal blue IS sky
>blue, or what we English speakers call sky blue.  Somehow, in English, all
>our basic linguistic color terms refer to colors that are darker than the
>actual, scientifically tested focal colors.
That's useful to know.

I think for Czirehlat I'm settling on a system with five basic hues (red,
yellow, green, blue, purple) plus black, white, and gray. I'll keep the
words for orange and brown, but I'm not sure yet if either or both of them
are basic colors. "Reji", which covered pink and magenta, will be split up,
with "bizari" for pink (derived from "biri" = red) and "reji" remaining for
reddish purples. "Juli" will be reserved for bluish purples and purplish
blues, while "nuri" is used for the more greenish blues. What used to be
the basic "blue" color, between "nuri" and "juli", will be called "nuguri"
(deep blue). It's a little bit artificial, but it's easier to relate this
scheme to hues in a paint program, since all these colors are equally
spaced in hue.

I also added a couple of new color words: "czevi" for pale browns, "yeji"
for yellowish green, and "kihli" (icy) for blue-green. ("Kihli" is a
remnant of another scheme I was playing around with, based on the idea of
warm and cool colors, with the basic focal colors named "fire" and "ice".)

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/png/czirehlat-colors.png

For comparison, I was looking at the basic color words in Olaetian and
Niesklåz, which I have in a hand-written chart (drawn with Crayola crayons)
from way back around 20 years ago. It's apparent that the Olaetian word
"aeç" isn't really a "blue-green", as I had in the dictionary, but more of
a greenish shade of blue, like Czirehlat "nuri", and Olaetian "xarin" is a
darker blue. Surprisingly, Niesklåz "idh", which is supposedly just
"green", is also a greenish blue (but greener than Olaetian "aeç"). Based
on this chart, Niesklåz has a very unnatural color system. (Some of my
other languages have unusual color systems, but they're not spoken by
humans, so it doesn't matter so much.) I made a new chart to compare the
Olaetian and Niesklåz colors with Czirehlat:

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/png/comparison.png