Re: Futurese: Colours

>>I used "eyes" the same I used "ears".
>>Unless you have some disfunction in them, they can
>>perceive all colour differences and all sounds.
>>But anything about language is a matter of neuronal
>>processes, so I think it would have been clear that
>>when I talked about "eyes" and "ears" I was talking
>>about our _mental_ "eyes" and "ears".
>
>"Mental ears" and "mental eyes" are not things I typically speak about.
>Infact, I can't on the top of my head think of any earlier instance I've
>heard anyone else speak about such the way you did either. In short, I
took
>an (to me) unknown idiom literally.
I wasn't using an idiom but rather a metaphor. Do you
really have such a difficulty understanding a metaphor?


>(BTW, you don't actually mean that our (physical) eyes and ears "can
>perceive all colour differences and all sounds", or so I hope. Our eyes
can
>only detect a few million _nuances_ (forgetting the English word) within
the
>visible spectrum out of the practically infinite number of possible
>radiation spectra, and those aren't even evenly spaced. Our ears similarly
>has restrictions on what differences they can detect.)
Of course! But *12* hues are far from being difficult
to separate and recognize, I wasn't talking about
having names for a hundred, a thousand or a million
different hues. English does in fact have names to refer
to varieties of each of those 12 hues and I think English
speakers don't have any difficulty identifying the
colours those names refer to. English in fact has names
that make even finer distinctions in hue than just those
12 in the IAL. Think e.g. of amber, which is a colour of
a hue intermediate between yellow and orange, or of mauve,
which I think refers to a colour intermediate between
pale violet (lilac) and pale magenta (lavender). Thus,
hues such as those of amber and mauve would be appear in a
24-hue partition of the colour wheel, twice more specific
than the one proposed for the IAL.

Cheers,
Javier