Re: Futurese: Colours

On Sun, 6 Oct 2002 14:52:06 +0200, Javier Barrio <uaxuctum@...> wrote:

>Well, dark yellow doesn't look like a kind
>of yellow from the point of view of the
>English concept of yellow, which only includes
>the vivid variety of that hue, the same way
>as English orange only includes its vivid
>variety.
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.

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