Re: Futurese: Colours

There's a bit of an intractable problem here, isn't there? Clearly, you want
your IAL to be as mutually intelligible as possible, but I don't think that
treating colours as simply RGB values will work. The reason is that no human
being perceives colours this way, including any potential speakers of an
IAL. An analogy might be to define 'large' as (say) 'anything greater than 2
metres' and small as 'anything smaller than 2 metres'. Of course, that would
not be sensible. In the same way, colours are not perceived quantitatively,
but culturally. We don't, for instance, regard red as something more than
blue (even though its wavelength is greater), but something different to
blue. Speaking personally, I think I might well need a portable colorimeter
to distinguish khaki from olive. There is, however, little possibility of
confusion for the reason that these terms are culturally conditioned - khaki
is a colour term used (as far as I know) only for clothing. The same is true
of colour terms in some natlangs, which define colour terms by criteria
other than those of wavelength.
Mike