Re: CHAT: The Conlang Instinct

On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, nicole perrin wrote:

> Make that four people on the list - I definitely have synesthetic
> sensibilities - each number has a definite color, and each letter as
> well.
This may be a little late, but I've had colors for numbers for a very long
time.  4, 5 and 9 are the strongest, with 2 and 3 next, then 1, and 6, 7
and 8 I actually had to think about before I could figure out what color
they were, so I'm not sure those three count.

I first remember being aware of the colors in connection with a child's
book about science that included color-mixing (with paint, not with
light).  I remember being satisfied that 4 (blue) and 5 (orange) made 9
(brown), and 2 (red) and 3 (yellow) made 5 (orange); but no other numbers
added the same as their colors did.  Well, years later I meditated on 7
and got "dark green", but it's not the shade of green that 3 (bright
yellow) and 4 (a middle-ish shade of blue) would make.  (6 is magenta, 1
is bright white, 0 is clear, 8 is pale yellow.)

In high school when I was studying Russian I realized that the Russian
vowels were strongly colored.  Some of the consonants were weakly colored.
English vowels are colored too, but for some reason they don't come
through as clearly or insistently as the Russian ones.  Maybe that's
related to the fact that the Russian palatalized vowels (ya, ye, yo, yu,
i) were brighter and more saturated than the others (a, e, o, u, and what
I can only describe as "uy").

Both Russian and English "r" and "l" are green and purple, but I don't
think it's consistent which is green and which is purple.

"a" is yellow.  Russian "ya" is bright, yummy yellow.  "e" is faint,
clearish white; Russian "ye" is only slightly brighter.  "o" is red,
Russian "yo" is bright red and white (it's written in Russian as "ye" with
diaresis (to bring in another thread!), which is where the white comes
from).  "u" is brown, darker in English, lighter in Russian; Russian "yu"
is deep, rich brown.  "i" is white, brighter in Russian than in English.
"uy" is grey.

So does anyone else notice that when the numbers or letters are next to
each other, they can make the other one brighter or change the shade a
little?  "au" is pretty, the yellow and brown shading into each other.
"ay" is as bright as the russian letter "ya".

> Different mathematic operations have certain pictures in my head,
> for example, multiplication is drawing a diagonal line; I view a year
> (or a month, week, etc) as a sort of loop...Lots of things have their
> own pictures.
Now that sounds really neat.  Wish I had that.

A year for me is always laid out with winter to the bottom, spring to the
right, summer above and fall to the west.  It's counterclockwise.  I don't
know why; I'm not in the southern hemisphere or anything.  Everytime I see
a picture of the Wheel of the Year, it goes the wrong way.

Sometimes I think I'm seeing it as a big clock that I'm inside, thus
seeing it from behind, which would explain the direction.

Amanda