Re: Futurese: Colours

>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. At first, I also "perceived"
the greens and blues to be closer among them than
e.g. orange and red. But now I've realized that it
is not true from an objective point of view. Try
forgetting about English. Then look at the
chromatic circle. Try doing it several times over
a period of time, say some weeks. ALWAYS forget
completely about how those colours would be named
in English. Forget also about all those things
painted in paradigmatic English red, yellow, green
and blue you may have seen, such as toys, etc. Look
at the things around you, at the people's clothes,
the cars, etc. and try to identify to which of the
12 hues in the scheme it most resembles. After that,
you should start to perceive that objectively
there isn't so much in common between indigo and
cyan. Also that between green and apple and between
apple and yellow there's more or less the same distance
and thus it isn't that unjustified to group them
into one single colour name, as the ancient Greek
or the old Basque did. Or that instead of grouping
indigo, blue and cyan together placing the focal hue
at blue, you can equaly well group blue, cyan and
viridian placing the focal hue at cyan, as done already
in many languages (Japanese, Vietnamese...).

At first, I couldn't "see" any similarity between
the brown of my wardrobe and the vivid orange of one
poster in front of it, since I was used to tell them
apart as unrelated colours according to what my
mother tongue has "tuned" me to do. That was several
weeks ago. Now, after having practised the 72 colour
varieties scheme and having toyed with orange hue
shadings which allowed me to perceive clearly how
vivid orange subtly turned into brown as it became
darker, I can't see why. I can know perrectly identify
the orange hue in brown and thus I can now perceive the
similarity between both. Now, I would have no problem
to say that both the wardrobe and the poster in my
room feature kinds of the same hue, one vivid, the
other dark.

If you practise the 12-hue/72-variety scheme, you'll
become more aware of the objective organization of
colour. Thus, learning the IAL would help to increase
the learner's awareness for colour perception, in the
same manner as learning the IAL would also help
increase the learner's awareness for other aspects,
such as verbal aspect, which from an English-speaker
perspective is hard to realize, since it is a
conceptual category expressed through completely
incoherent strategies in that language (sometimes
using a different tense, sometimes using an adverb,
sometimes using a phrasal verb...).


>(Actually, this would be a good exercise in general: take some scanned
>pictures, try to identify the hues first simply by looking at them, then
>use a paint program to find what hues are really stored in the image file,
>and compare the results.)
Well, but when doing so you should bear well in mind
that the same physical colour may appear differently
according to which colours are surrounding it, since
our retinex processes together the information from
each point with that from the surrounding areas and
the whole scene. Language colour names deal with
appearances, not with physical light wavelengths.
That's why sample colours are showed on a grey
neutral background.


>Yellow is also more significant than other colors because our eyes are
more
>sensitive to wavelengths of light in that general range.
The experiments to determine which wavelengths our
eyes are more sensitive to, with speakers of which
languages were made? And which colours were more
present in their daily life or were important for
their culture? I have doubts that such experiments
have ever been made outside Western countries or
countries where Western culture has had considerable
influence. Had any such experiment ever been made
with Amazonian Indians, Australian Aborigines or
Eskimos, the results would most probably differ
from those you may get from Westerners.

It's the same as if they take a bunch of English
speakers and made with them an experiment to see
which phonetic our ears are more sensitive to.
Obviously, the ears of an English speaker have been
"tuned" to be more sensitive to certain sound features
than others: those that are relevant for English
phonology, while became "deaf" to those that aren't.
But if you then take a bunch of Japanese the results
of your experiment will be completely different.
Similarly, our eyes have been "tuned" to be more
sensitive to the colour differences and categorizations
that are relevant for our language, while became
"blind" to those that aren't.

One of the main objections posed to the B&K survey
is that is was made with native speakers of the
languages but who at the time were living in or
around *California* and had thus had intense exposure
to English colour terminology.


>Compare that to
>cyan -- certain gemstones, some tropical birds, and not much else that
>immediately comes to mind.
...the immense sky at dawn.
Why the Russians would then bother to have a word for it?


>The point is, not all hues are equal -- there seems to be more of a
>need to distinguish hues in the red-to-yellow range of the spectrum than
in
>the yellow-to-green or green-to-cyan ranges.
Those "needs" are cultural- and environment-dependant.
For an Eskimo, there's little need to distinguish
three or four colours of the red-to-yellow range as
English does. (S)he's more likely to need words for
different kinds of white and grey. While for someone
living inside the rain forest, there's more need for
different kinds of green.

Not all languages share English richness of basic
terms for the red-to-yellow area. In Basque, they
didn't seem to need more than just one name for the
colours ranging from amber to pink, including red,
orange and brown. It was not until very recently that
they borrowed loanwords from Spanish to adapt their
language to "Western colour habits".


>the darker part of a flame, molten
>lava,
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.


>I can't imagine how a language does without a
>basic word for "gray", but I'm sure that's just my English bias.
You can bet it is. There are few non-Western languages
I'm aware of that feature a specific basic word for grey.
Those others, like Japanese, Basque, Welsh or Ancient
Greek, that have a colour centered around cyan-bluegreen,
usually include grey in it.


>Japanese
>seems to do just fine with "mouse-color".)
AFAIK, it's "ash colour" (hai-iro), rather than
"mouse colour".


>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.
Red, yellow and green are, but not those in
relation to blue and purple. If you want to
see a similar set of colours really evenly
spaced, look at the six-colour scheme of
primaries and secondaries. Those six colours
are evenly spaced, and you can check that out
simply by staring at a surface painted in one of
them for a certain time. Then close your eyes. For
a while you'll perceive the opposite colour "inside"
your head, which means that each one causes the
opposite perception in your retinex. That's why
complementary colours are located one in front of
the other in the colour wheel and that's why they
match so well when combined in a colour composition
--try combining Prussian blue and yellow, violet
and yellow and then indigo and yellow, you'll see
that the last combination looks more "balanced".

Besides, purple is not such a common basic colour
as you may think. Just have a look at English: both
purple and violet are words derived from things
(purple refers to the Tyrian mollusk and the dye
extracted from it and violet is a flower). Somewhere
in a webpage about a Native American language I read
that in that language they had no word for purple,
until when recently one of its speakers got upset
when he found on his new car a bird's defecation
featuring that colour. He then _baptized_ that colour
for which there was no previous name in his native
tongue using a compound meaning something the like of
"bird-defecation-colour", and the name caught on.


>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, leaving aside crimson
--why do you leave it aside? certainly, women
wouldn't be much satisfied with your proposal, since
it does not create the same effect to have your
lips painted in crimson than having them in red or
in magenta-- and grouping essential and additional
colours arbitrarily.


> 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.

Cheers,
Javier

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