Re: Mauve and a related conlang question

Christophe Grandsire writes:
 > En réponse à Clint Jackson Baker <litrex1@...>:
 >
 > >
 > > "Mauve" is very much a colour name in English.  The
 > > word is the name of an artist (what's it called when a
 > > word comes from a person's name?) and the school of
 > > art that evolved around him.
 >
 > Really? I thought it came from the name of a flower... At least in French I
 > think it does (just like "violet", by the way :)) ).
 >
You're right.  "Mauve" (the flower) is "mallow" in English*.  But it's
use as a colour word in English dates to the mid-19th-Century, when
William H. Perkin produced a bright but delicate pale purple analine
dye from coal tar, and named it mauve.  It was the first synthetic dye.


[...]
 >
 >  and I think of the 1980s, when
 > > it was popular along with the rest of the pastels.
 > > And I think of it as a light magenta to dark purplish
 > > pink.  Or to be totally precise, HTML colour codes
 > > CC6699, 996699, CC99CC, and 993366 (you can look it up
 > > online to see what they look like).  Those four
 > > colours I would automatically call mauve.
 > >
 >
 > I would agree with you on those. They are quite what I had in mind (though my
 > mauve can also refer to warmer colours, containing a bit more pink then the
 > ones you pointed at :)) ).
 >
Note that this doesn't necessarily give us a perfect standard of
comparison - different monitors will show the same colour
differently.  Even the same monitor with different settings, for that
matter - brightness, saturation, "colour temperature".


 > > Okay, now here's a conlang question--how do your
 > > conlangs deal with colour?
 >
 > It's usually something I don't work on (shame on me). The only exception is
 > with Moten, with which I worked the colour system very thoroughly :)) .
 >
 >   Kayasanoda has ten words
 > > for colours that can be modified "light" and "dark",
 > > or can be joined like the classic
 > > Crayolas--"red-violet" and "yellow-orange", like that.
 > >  My "essential" colour words  are:
 > > 1 black
 > > 2 white
 > > 3 grey
 > > 4 brown
 > > 5 red
 > > 6 orange
 > > 7 yellow
 > > 8 green
 > > 9 blue
 > > 10 purple
 >
 > Moten actually doesn't have colour names. It only has the noun |va|: colour,
 > which it can compount with plenty of other nouns to make colour names. But
 > those are transparent compounds. As a result, you don't have "pure" colours
 > like "red" or "blue" in Moten, but only colours that refer to the colour of an
 > existing object. For instance, |emeva| means "sun's colour" and refers thus to
 > a bright yellow. |kunemeva| means "setting sun's colour" and refers thus to a
 > dark red, while  ||zajemeva| (|z is a letter in Moten) means "rising sun's
 > colour" and refers to a reddish orange. |bo| means "sky" (or more exactly "day
 > sky", and thus |bova| refers to "sky blue". |dod| is "night" and thus |dodva|
 > is "night colour", or "dark blue". |vone| is "water", and |voneva| refers to a
 > greenish blue. Some colours are highly metaphorical, like |da|nava|: "the
 > colour of life" which is a light green, |ude|lava|: "humble colour" which
 > refers to indigo (a colour so humble that you often don't know that you see
 > it :)) ), or |motenva| which is a bright purple (the reason why the name of the
 > language is used for this colour is unknown).
 >
 > So Moten doesn't have primary colours. The only exceptions are "black"
 > and "white", which are respectively |meva|: "no-colour" and |nuva|: "all-
 > colour". A consequence of the lack of primary colours is that the colours in
 > Moten are highly descriptive, and more limited in their use. |kunemeva| means
 > red, but cannot be used for hair for instance. To describe red hair, you have
 > to use the word |adva|: "fire colour".

Interesting.  All this talk of colours reminds me of Berlin & Kay's
work on the universality of colour terms, which I've seen references
to in various places over the years.  The best I could come up with on
short notice was from

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_168b.html

I'll quote the relevant section here


!So what does explain the variations? That's still a matter of
!dispute. The majority view, I would venture to say, is that the
!designation of colors in different cultures is totally arbitrary. For
!instance, H.A. Gleason notes, "There is a continuous gradation of
!color from one end of the spectrum to the other. Yet an American
!describing it will list the hues as red, orange, yellow, green, blue,
!purple, or something of the kind. There is nothing inherent either in
!the spectrum or the human perception of it which would compel its
!division in this way" (An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics,
!1961). Similarly, Verne Ray says "there is no such thing as a natural
!division of the spectrum. Each culture has taken the spectral
!continuum and has divided it up on a basis which is quite arbitrary"
!("Techniques and Problems in the Study of Human Color Perception,"
!Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 1952).
!
!More recent research, however, suggests that color terminology may not
!be so arbitrary after all. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (Basic Color
!Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, 1969), to whom Cecil is
!indebted for much of the preceding discussion, suggest that there is a
!remarkable degree of uniformity in the way different cultures assign
!color names. In a study of 98 languages from a variety of linguistic
!families, they found the following "rules" seem to apply:
!
!1. All languages contain terms for white and black.
!
!2. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for
!   red.
!
!3. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for
!   either green or yellow (but not both).
!
!4. If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both
!   green and yellow.
!
!5. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
!
!6. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for
!   brown.
!
!7. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains a term
!   for purple, pink, orange, grey, or some combination of these.
!
!Berlin and Kay also found that the number of basic color terms tends
!to increase with the complexity of the civilization. They speculated
!that this explains the relative poverty of color terminology among the
!ancients--e.g., the Greeks had terms only for black, white, yellow,
!and red because theirs was a relatively uncomplicated culture, at
!least from a technological standpoint. But Berlin and Kay admit they
!don't know why the "rules" should operate as they do. For more detail,
!check out their book.

I seem to remember seeing somewhere that the fundamental colour groups
were always centered on the same wavelengths, but I could be imagining
it.  It may have been in Pinker's _How the Mind Works_, but I couldn't
say for sure that it even discusses the matter.

* One variety is the marsh mallow, although I'm not certain of the
  connection between the flower and the confection.

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