Re: Futurese: Colours

On Sat, 5 Oct 2002 05:23:42 -0400, Javier BF <uaxuctum@...> wrote:

>>No, I was replying specifically to the comment "the series really appears
>>to be evenly distributed." I don't perceive the colors as being at all
>>evenly distributed.
>
>That's a consequence of how your language tells
>you to group colours.
No, it's a question of the perceived distance between adjacent colors in
that specific image, nothing at all to do with grouping. Adjusting the
brightness of some of the colors might help.

>>Compare that to
>>cyan -- certain gemstones, some tropical birds, and not much else that
>>immediately comes to mind.
Also, some polar ice. Probably a few other things, but it's still a lot
easier to come up with lists of yellow things.

>...the immense sky at dawn.
>Why the Russians would then bother to have a word for it?
I've seen scanned pictures of the sky, and surprisingly it turns out to be
blue. I thought it would have been more cyan also, but it's just a pale
blue (between cyan and indigo) in the pictures I've checked. The dawn sky
if anything ought to have more red in it.

I googled for "dawn" and checked a couple of the pictures.

http://ironpeak.toad.com/whitney/30-dawn.jpg

There's some borderline cyan shades near the middle of the picture here,
but the farther away from the white area you get, it turns out to be more
blue.

http://www.bulgaria.com/photos/graphics/dawn.jpg

Clearly blue, with shades of purple near the horizon. (It turns out to be
"blue" in both the Futurese system and the decimal system.)

>Taking those into account, it would be completely justified
>*not* to separate orange from red and yellow, since if
>you look at those things, you'll see a colour continuum
>from red to yellow similar to the continuum from cyan
>to indigo in the sky.
The whole spectrum is a continuum. That doesn't stop us from naming colors.

>>I've been experimenting with the idea of a "decimal system" for color --
>>using five evenly spaced hues as fundamental colors instead of six, and
>>five secondary colors between them. The basic hues are red, yellow, green,
>>blue, and purple
>
>Those colours are by no means evenly spaced.
These aren't the same exact hues as the corresponding English or Futurese
colors. The decimal system colors are evenly spaced in hue _by definition_.
They're reasonably similar enough to the English colors that I use the
English words for convenience, but they're not identical.

The decimal colors still don't _appear_ to be quite evenly spaced, but I've
been finding them a little bit more satisfactory in that regard than the
6-color system, since the green and yellow are farther apart. I've also
found that adjusting the lightness of the colors to make them appear more
similar in value can make a big difference.

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/png/decimal-colors.png

It's still a little rough, and I need to tweak the lightness of the colors
some more to get the spacing more even, but at least it shows the general
idea of the basic hues of the system.

>Besides, purple is not such a common basic colour
>as you may think.
No, but it works for the decimal system.

>>The secondary hues are orange, yellow-green,
>>turquoise, indigo, and magenta.
>
>You're then proposing almost the same scheme, but
>in a far less coherent way
"Different from your system" isn't the same thing as "far less coherent".
You _specifically asked_ for an alternative system, and you complain when
you get one? Sometimes I wonder what's the point of commenting at all.

>> This system could be extended in a similar
>>way with modifiers for combinations of lightness and saturation, although
>>the way I use them, I have distinct basic words for brown (dark reds and
>>oranges) and olive (dark yellows and yellow-greens).
>
>And why individual names just for those but not for
>others? What about beige, maroon, lilac, lavender,
>salmon...? Having names for some varieties of some
>hues but not for others introduces arbitrarity into
>the scheme. In my proposal, you can easily name all
>those and many others with simple two-morpheme
>combinations.
You could do that just as easily in the decimal system. Note that I said
"the way _I_ use them". My goals are quite different from yours. (In fact,
I have distinct words for maroon, scarlet, copper, ochre, sepia, beige,
tan, gold, teal, cerulean, violet, lavender, and pink, but I didn't think
that was relevant to the question you were asking.) The problem is, even
though you _can_ say "dark yellow", the color you actually get when you
darken yellow doesn't look like any kind of yellow at all. So it makes
sense to group the dark yellows with the dark yellow-greens.

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