Re: Colors in Czirehlat

On Mon, 30 Jul 2001 04:51:05 EDT, David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>
wrote:

>    I went to both sites and looked at your diagrams, and I really like your
>color system, and it's perfectly workable.  In my first language, I went wild
>with color terms.  I kept the 11 basic, tons of extras like "teal",
>"magenta", and so forth, and then also more basic color terms, like "warm",
>and even a color I called "tree", which describes the colors one sees when
>looking at a forest scene in the daytime (every shade of green, yellow,
>browns and some black, with the occasional splash of red/purple from a flower
>or two...).  Anyway, your system makes "color" sense to me, if that's a real
>concept, and that's all that counts, in my book.  :)
"Teal" would be a good color to add, somewhere in the gap between "ice" and
"gray" on the chart....

So "tree" is essentially a word for a color texture: neat idea. I guess
"gold" and "silver" are simple examples of that sort of thing.

Speaking of going wild with color terms, Gjarrda has 10 basic color words:
black, white, gray, and 7 different hues (although red, yellow, green, and
blue are considered more fundamental than the other basic hues), plus words
for 7 intermediate hues. Combinations of saturation and value are
represented by 6 different suffixes, which can be combined in various ways.

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/gif/colors.gif

The captions are in the Ljoerr alphabet; in romanized transcription the
basic hues (the second row of names) are:

ghoulj=red, gjuen=orange, tral=yellow, zeisj=green, snul=cyan, meor=blue,
zjar=magenta,

and the intermediate hues (the top row) are:

vourr=copper (including brown), zil=gold, yeun=lime, draz=turquoise,
rul=azure, vrrein=purple, kem=pink.

In theory the system can represent 679 different colors. But in practice,
it ends up being too complicated for everyday use, and it's plainly
artificial (brown as a shade of "copper", and no basic root for brown? does
anyone outside the printing or video industries use "cyan" as a color word
at all, much less a basic one?!). I think the Czirehlat system could be
more successful.

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