Re: Futurese: Colours

On Fri, 4 Oct 2002 11:59:10 +0200, Javier Barrio <uaxuctum@...> wrote:

>> 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.
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.

>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?
The sun may be a single thing, but it's a pretty significant one. Fire is
another. I could go on naming things like goldfinches, yellow-and-black
striped wasps, the eyes of certain animals, sulfur, and so on, but that's
just the bright, highly saturated yellows. Some things that appear green or
brown are really shades of "yellow" according to this system. Look at some
scanned photographs in a paint program and see; you may be surprised.

(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.)

Yellow is also more significant than other colors because our eyes are more
sensitive to wavelengths of light in that general range. Compare that to
cyan -- certain gemstones, some tropical birds, and not much else that
immediately comes to mind. Magenta is a fairly common flower color, at
least. 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.

>> 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...
Some flowers, some birds, some insects, the darker part of a flame, molten
lava, tigers. Not many languages have orange as a basic color. It's almost
cheating to include the English word "orange", since it's the name of a
fruit, but they had some argument in favor of including "orange" in the
basic English colors that I don't immediately recall. But it's in the same
category with gray, pink, and purple, which are supposedly the less common
basic color categories. (I can't imagine how a language does without a
basic word for "gray", but I'm sure that's just my English bias. Japanese
seems to do just fine with "mouse-color".)

>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?
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 (where yellow is the CRT yellow, and the others are evenly
spaced around the hue axis). The secondary hues are orange, yellow-green,
turquoise, indigo, and magenta. 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). The Tirelat system of
colors (http://www.io.com/~hmiller/png/tirelhat-colors.png) was based on an
earlier version of this decimal system.

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