Re: Survey(?) of ConLangs' Calendars and Colors and Kinterms

Hi all,

On Sun, 6 Nov 2005, John Vertical wrote:
> Yahya Abdal-Aziz wrote:
> >I conclude that Malay has no monomorphemic word for 'brown'
> >that distinguishes it from 'red'; this leaves me to make the
> >interesting claim that Malay at least represents another class,
> >namely -
> >
> >VIII: V + blue-purple + indigo.
>
> And later on:
> >Perhaps I missed something here - were we also counting those
> >monomorphemic colour terms that simpy reuse the name of some
> >substance familiar to the culture?
>
> It seems extremely unlikely to me that a language would distinguish blue,
> blue-purple and indigo, but not eg. orange and brown; I would suspect that
> "indigo" were also primarily the name of a substance - that is, the name
of
> the dye solution, not of its color. (It doesn't exactly matter that
there's
> a separate word for the indigo plant too. Especially since there is not a
> single "the" indigo plant.)
If the word 'nila' only named the dye, and not its colour
(I don't say it does!), would it still seem as unlikely to you
that the language would distinguish blue and [blue-]purple,
but not orange and brown?

If you took a systematic approach to colours, you might
start with the standard 'subtractive colours' red, blue
and yellow as 'primary' colours.  You'd then mix pairs of
these primaries in (optically) equal proportions to create
the 'secondary' colours purple, green and orange.  Finally,
you'd mix all three primaries in equal proportions to get
brown.  Of course, you could mix any of these colours
with white to get 'tints' or with black to get 'shades'.
And you could vary the proportions to get different hues.

But there's no real reason to believe that speakers of
any natlang have deliberately constructed their colour
terms in such a systematic way.  If, as I believe, humans
have invented or adopted colour terms mostly for their
practical utility, then the selection of colours named in
natlangs would, one expects, be rather unsystematic and
even patchy.  Such is the case in the various classes of
the typology we've been discussing.


> This of course doesn't override blue-purple (could we say that it's
> "phonemically" just plain purple?) ...
Not phonemically, I think, but semantically?  But yes, we
could regard red and purple as a pair of colours that share
a common frontier, one which is drawn in different places
by different languages - exactly as the cartographers of
two warring states might draw their common frontier.


> ... being included before brown is - which is
> of course interesting too.
I agree - particularly since there are many different kinds
of brown substance in the natural world in which Malay
came into being, probably many more than there are kinds
of purple substance.  If we suppose that, on grounds of
economy, any language makes only those distinctions which
it finds useful, then it would follow that the 'purple'
attribute must have been more useful than the 'brown'
attribute.  My guess is that the primary use of the colour
'purple' would have been in teaching young people to
identify fruit in the forest.


> Also:
> >The most useful insights given by this classification are, I think,
> ...
> >2. that the most basic contrast is the most extreme - between light
> >and dark (white and black); and the second is between 'hot' colours
> >(red) and the rest.
>
> So, with system IIIa, you'd analyze "red" = "dark hot", "yellow" = "light
> hot"? Interesting, but what about IIIb then?? Green seems to be somewhat
> neutral with regards to both the light/dark and hot/cold dichotomies.
'Green' is a very interesting colour!   Mostly because
there are just so _many_ different greens.  In English
we need to qualify our greens to get yellow-greens and
blue-greens, and I think this is also the case in most
natlangs.  I find this rather surprising, since perceptually,
human vision is most responsive to greens, in two ways:
first, that green light contributes approximately 60% to
our sensation of brightness (red 30% and blue only 10%);
second, that we can distinguish many more hues of green
than of any other of the seven spectral colours ROYGBIV
(Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet) formed by
splitting natural white light by a prism or rainbow.  So
much so, that in the last few years, interior designers
have moved away from using the traditional colour wheel,
in which red, blue and yellow are spaced equally around
the circumference of the circle, with various mixtures
as colour gradients between them. They now use a FOUR-
colour wheel, with 'primaries' of red, blue, green and
yellow.  Doing so makes many more hues of green readily
available for selection.  (As a byproduct, it also changes
which colours are considered complements - those which
lie directly opposite each other on the wheel.)

Again, as in the case of 'purple', I can only surmise that
the comparative paucity of monomorphemic terms for
different hues of 'green' is the result of the lack of any
great utility for them.  In English, we have the loanword
'chartreuse' for a particular green, but it's unknown to
most speakers of English as L1.  The other possible reason
that comes to mind is that field linguists have failed to
collect colour terms that do exist in the target natlang,
but which do not match their own perceptual categories.
Still, one would expect that, if this were the case, the
rise of native linguists, and the continued use of those
terms in the natlang, would correct the error.

A yellow-green (think a psychedelic lime) can be a very
hot green; a blue-green (think aquamarine, turquoise,
cyan) can range from light (and bright) to dark, and
among these, the darker colours are generally seen as
cooler and the lighter as warmer.  However, specific
experiences may change a very pale blue-green to ice!
I think there's a couple of factors that interact to
determine how hot we feel a particular blue-green is:
the intensity or saturation and the experiences our
environment expose us to.  If you've never seen ice,
but have only ever seen a pale blue-green as the colour
of a sky washed out by a blazing white-hot sun, the
'icy' blue-green someone else sees may well be instead
a 'scorching' blue-green.

Regards,
Yahya

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