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Re: Futurese: Colours

From:Javier Barrio <uaxuctum@...>
Date:Friday, October 4, 2002, 9:59
> 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 _______________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger Nueva versión: Webcam, voz, y mucho más ¡Gratis! Descárgalo ya desde http://messenger.yahoo.es

Replies

Muke Tever <mktvr@...>
Herman Miller <hmiller@...>