Re: CHAT: Orange

On Thu, 2002-06-06 at 16:41, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En réponse à Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>:
>
> > Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> > > Well, the strangeness of English is getting worse! What's the point of
> > calling
> > > it "indigo" if it's a kind of blue?
> >
> > The same as using terms like "scarlet" or "sky blue" or "crimson" etc.
>
> But scarlet and crimson are specific terms which refer first to a thing and
> then to its colour. And "sky blue" is a compound, comparable to "apple green".
> Indigo is something else. At least to me.
I think of 'scarlet' and 'crimson' only as colours, never as specific
things. I wouldn't have a clue what a scarlet or a crimson was unless
you meant a shade of scarlet or crimson. 'Sky blue' is a fixed compound
that refers to a specific shade of light blue. 'Apple green' could be
any green that apples are, from green-green to yellow-green.

> But for me light red is light red, not pink :)) . The two don't look alike at
> all. Also, you can lighten and darken pink too, and dark pink absolutely
> doesn't look like red, or what I would call red (it is more browny, though not
> really brown).
Then you aren't speaking proper English. 'Pink' is the English term for
'light red' or fluorescent red. (I think I know the colour you're
thinking of, but I'm not sure of it's name. I want to call it
'lavender', but lavender is to violet what pink is to red (although
perhaps slightly bluer). I'd probably just call it purply-red. But there
probably is a 'real name' for it, I'm pretty bad with giving colours
names.)

> > In fact, sometimes I think that light blue and dark blue would be more
> > justified being split up into two basic colors than red and pink.
> >
>
> I don't think so. You can go continuously from dark blue to light blue simply
> by lightening it up. You cannot do that between red and pink. My perception of
> colours seems to be related to those considerations. That's maybe why I tend to
> recognise more colours than you do :)) .
You can go from pink to red, though. RGB(255 180 180) is a pink-colour.
RGB(255 0 0) is a red-colour. RGB(180 180 255) is light blue and
RGB(0 0 255) is blue. OTOH, RGB(0 0 50) is navy, but there's no normal
specific name for dark red.

(For those who don't know, RGB means 'red-green-blue' and is a way of
specifying a specific colour. The numbers within are a value from
between 0 and 255 specifying the amount, in 255tths, of red, green and
blue (respectively) are involved.)

> Natlangy note :)) : Purple and violet are different colours in English? That's
> strange. I was taught that the equivalent of French "violet" was purple. But if
> you also have violet, what is then the correspondent in French? I'm confused,
> because maybe I've been using the term purple all along when I should have said
> violet...
Violet tends to have less red in it that purple does, I think. Violet
tends also to be darker or bolder. It's much the same colour as violets
are. Or at least, that's how I think of it.

Tristan.

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