Re: Futurese: Colours

> This JPG image has a lot of very visible compression
artifacts, which might
> affect the intended appearance.
Did you have trouble perceiving the colour
differences?
In my screen, at least, all of them looked perceptibly
different.


> But in any case, there's always going to
> appear to be less visual difference in the range
between green and yellow,
> and more difference between blue and the adjacent
colors, as long as you
> use the CRT primary colors as your basic colors.
Just because the hues may
> be evenly spaced in the internal computer
representation doesn't mean your
> eyes will agree.
That's simply a consequence of the way screens
reproduce colours. They don't allow to vary the
degree of brightness of each point (only the
brightness of the whole screen). And thus, given
that basic green in those screens is perceptibly more
bright than basic red and basic blue, the former
"eclipses" some of the amount of the latter,
especially
when green is already the dominant colour in the
mixture, with the consequence that you have to add
more red or blue to get the visual perception of a
colour that really seems to be half-way between
green and yellow or between green and cyan.

But that doesn't mean that in *real life* those
intermediate hues are harder to recognize. I see
them everyday everywhere. At least here in Madrid
I can see lots of cars and T-shirts in both
bluegreen and applegreen and it's easy to perceive
those colours are half-way between green and yellow
and green and cyan.


> Other than artists, not many people will be familiar
with the primary
> colors used in printing,
And what? They'll become acquainted with them
simply when they learn the language. Once you've
seen the six-colour scheme of primaries and
secondaries, it's pretty hard to forget it. And the
good thing is that scheme can be reproduced as a
reference with the greatest ease and accuracy
everywhere around the world on screens and books.


> so having cyan and magenta as basic color
> categories would only make sense if there are lots
of objects in the world
> having those colors. They're certainly not as
important as yellow,

How many natural things are yellow? Lemons, the sun,
some (not many) flowers, saffron, gold, amber, egg
yolks... anything else? Does it make sense to have
a specific basic name for a colour featured in as
many natural things as fingers in our hands?


> and
> probably less than orange (especially if orange is
considered to include
> shades of brown that fall into that range of hues).
Yes, especially; because if not, orange is only
present
in nature in oranges, carrots and... anything else?
And yet B&K proclaimed it a universally basic
colour...


> I don't agree entirely
> with the idea of the 11 basic color categories that
just happen to match
> the basic color words in English (if you count
"pink" as a basic color,
> which at least to me is questionable)
Dare to question the basicness of pink, stated as
a universal fact by that B&K survey everybody
seems to believe in almost as a religion?


> but it's based on research with
> native speakers of diverse languages using
standardized color chips, and it
> might at least be worth looking into.
O.K. But in any case, that research deals with what
*NAT*langs do. If a con-auxlang is supposed to
reproduce
what natlangs do, to start with it should be full of
irregularities; otherwise it will look "artificial".
From my point of view, an IAL must be designed in a
way similar to the metric system, i.e. providing a
regularized standard. If the metric system had been
designed to imitate what natural languages used to
do regarding measures, it would have ended up being
completely chaotic: 12 inches = 1 foot, 3 feet = 1
yard,
2 yards = 1 fathom, 5.5 yards = 1 rod, 220 yards = 1
furlong, 1,760 yards = 1 mile; 3 scruples = 1 dram,
8 drams = 1 ounce, 12 ounces = 1 pound... Simply,
wonderful.

The colour terminology in natlangs, which establishes
colour areas of amazingly different size (blue and
green each occupy and area as big as that of red,
orange, brown and yellow altogether), may be somewhat
justified on the basis of which colours were more
present in the daily life of people *in the past*,
when those terminologies developed. But nowadays, it
is possible to produce any colour you want and, at
least in Western countries, you can nowadays see
*any* colour as often as any other.

The scheme I propose allows to name any colour you
need to name with ease, regardless of it being a cold
or a warm one. Please, have a look at these samples
showing 72 varieties (shallow, vivid, deep; pale,
faint
and dull) of the 12 hues:

Varieties of crimson, red and orange:
http://espanol.groups.yahoo.com/group/ideolengua/files/Futures/Futures-Colores-Variantes-1.JPG

Varieties of yellow, apple and green:
http://espanol.groups.yahoo.com/group/ideolengua/files/Futures/Futures-Colores-Variantes-2.JPG

Varieties of viridian, cyan and blue:
http://espanol.groups.yahoo.com/group/ideolengua/files/Futures/Futures-Colores-Variantes-3.JPG

Varieties of indigo, violet and magenta:
http://espanol.groups.yahoo.com/group/ideolengua/files/Futures/Futures-Colores-Variantes-4.JPG

Also, it allows you to be vague if you want to.
I think I've already explained this point here:
Just use the six essential hues and add the morphemes
for "extended" and "similar" if necessary (of course,
you can also choose any of the additional ones if you
like). Have a look at this sample showing apart the
essential colours (white, black, red, yellow, green,
cyan, indigo and magenta) from the additional ones,
intermediate between those (grey, crimson, apple,
viridian, blue and violet):

http://espanol.groups.yahoo.com/group/ideolengua/files/Futures/Futures-Colores-2.JPG

Here's again the link to the sample of the colours
arranged altogether:

http://espanol.groups.yahoo.com/group/ideolengua/files/Futures/Futures-Colores-1.JPG

Nobody will force you to actively distinguish the
greens and blues if you don't want to. Learning
materials would teach you what they mean in case
someone else uses them, but they should also teach
you how to translate the colour set of your language
and then you can simply stay with those for your
personal use. A feature of the scheme proposed is
that it allows to translate with certain accuracy the
colours of not only English and other Western
languages
(it provides focal points for the hues of blue, green,
orange, purple, pink...), but also of Classical Greek
and Latin (focal points for glaukos and chloros), of
Russian (focal points for sinij and goluboj), of
Hungarian (focal points for piros and vörös)...

Can you offer an alternative system which would allow
to name specific colours (such as those 72 varieties)
with comparable ease--and using only colour terms,
without reference to things that may be not available
or uncommon in some or most places around the world--,
but also to be vague with the same ease when you want
to and to adapt the different colour distributions of
natlangs?

Cheers,
Javier

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