Re: Futurese: Colours

>If you'd read B&K yet you'd know by "basic" they mean that it is not a
>subcategory of another color.  In English you can't say that focal
<orange> is a
>'kind' of <red> or <yellow> (or <blue> for that matter).
I know, but for the speakers of many languages orange
is not an independent colour as it is in English.
In Hungarian, for example, they consider it simply as
a kind of "sárga" (yellow), and Hungarian has quite
a lot of basic colours (including two kinds of red).


>That is kind of an odd consequence of the B&K finding that in _any_
language
>with 11 basic color categories they would match the basic color words of
>English.  [Of course the whole thing could be because of the sting of
English
>influence--certainly the word "blue" seems to spread like a virus....]
Of English influence, or of Western culture influence
as a whole. I'm yet to discover an Asiatic, African,
Amerindian... language whose native colour system
reflected exactly that 11 colour distribution of European
languages which B&K stablished as conceptual language
universals.


>Speaking of metricity, your example images have a lot of spot colors and
not
>very many gradients--where are the borders, the ranges of these colors?
E.g.,
>at what point does <verde> become <glauco>?
Well, colours are semantic categories primarily defined
by their centers and so that's the most important (though
yes, not the only) aspect to get a grasp of what each
colour "means". Does any English speaker really know
where exactly lies the frontier between any of the
English colours?

For the IAL, the "rule" would be that, taking any two
adjacent hues, the frontier should fall where that
intermediate hue _appears_ to be at equal distance from
both centers. That's subjective, but languages work that
way. Our eyes are not measurement machines, so such
frontiers cannot be as well defined as the colour centers.
But neither can you define where the frontier between many
other pairs of concepts lies. Where's the frontier between
good and bad, or between tall and short? And yet people
_know_ what good, bad, tall and short mean.

Cheers,
Javier