Re: Futurese: Colours

>It's not limited to English; of the 20 languages represented in the color
>charts in Berlin & Kay's 1969 book, only Cantonese has a word for "yellow"
>that also includes the darker shades. Take a look at a medium-dark shade
of
>yellow near the border with yellow-green, like R=100, G=128, and if you're
>still comfortable using the same basic word for colors like that and a
more
>typical "yellow" like R=220, G=220, then you can go ahead and do that. But
>you should realize that this is unnatural for speakers of most languages,
>and will be an obstacle to learning the color names. Unless the people of
>the future who speak this language all have portable colorimeters that
they
>carry with them to measure the actual hue of what they're looking at, or
>something along those lines.
Do you mean you need a portable colorimeter to
distinguish khaki from olive?

Besides, near the border with yellow-green, the
resulting colour shouldn't be called simply "yellow"
but rather "yellow-greenish (olivish) yellow".
Dark yellow near the border with dark yellowgreen
would be what in English one would call "olivish
khaki" rather than simply "khaki".

Just because many languages name different kinds of
the yellow hue with different names doesn't mean that
a regularized IAL should do that while not doing
analogously with other hues if that IAL is really
intended to display a regular pattern. Many (most in
fact) languages are full or irregularities and
incoherences, but IMHO an IAL is not intended to
imitate them in that respect. And, as you mention,
there are in fact natlangs which already name yellow
and khaki together considering thus only the hue in the
same manner as how they classify red and maroon togethe
according to their common hue. The colour names of the
IAL are grouped into categories (hue-names,
lightness/saturation-names, etc.) and those referring
to hue refer only to hue regardless which hue it is
(be it purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, etc.).
That's what I understand as a regularized pattern.
If you start splitting hue-only names (such as English
blue) into lightness/saturation-defined names (such as
English yellow, khaki, lilac, orange, brown, maroon,
lavender, salmon, olive, pink, etc.) you'll end up with
either near a hundred individual colour names for every
variation of each hue, or an irregular unpredictable
pattern like that of English which has names for certain
varieties of some hues but not for others.

As I think I've already said, just don't think of the
IAL "yellow" morpheme as equivalent to English yellow
because simply it isn't English yellow. English yellow
would be IAL "vivid _yellow_". That IAL _yellow_ is a
concept involving only the hue feature and thus different
from the lightness/saturation-restricted yellow concept
of English. You'd better think of that IAL morpheme as
something like "beigeyellowochrekhaki" instead of simply
"yellow" in order to perceive its concept (what there
is in common among beige, yellow, ochre, khaki) more
clearly and not to confuse it with English yellow.

Cheers,
Javier

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