Re: CHAT: Orange

| -----Original Message-----
| From: Christophe Grandsire
| Subject: Re: CHAT: Orange
|
| That's the definition of the colour and no other.
| What you perceive is something else,
| and you may not perceive the difference between blue
| and indigo, or just
| learned the word so late that you're used to call "blue"
| what in reality should
| be called "indigo". Yet indigo exists as a separate colour
| and it is unfair to
| put it down as "a kind of blue". It's not a kind of blue
| to me. To me it's
| simply the colour that goes between blue and purple (which
| are not connected to
| me), just like green goes between yellow and blue or orange
| between red and yellow.
| Christophe.

        Actually (because I like playing with lighter fluid in a room of
open flames), indigo is between blue and violet. Purple is a blend of red
and blue, and therefore a light wavelength interference pattern. Violet is
the set of pure wavelengths in the range between indigo and ultraviolet. You
can have a violet laser (pure polarized light, single wavelength), but not a
purple laser (at least two wavelengths, therefore you get interference). In
high school, I remember both my art and physics teachers being very adamant
about this.

        More language-ish: In one of the books I read recently (I think
"Aspects of Language"), it mentioned a study about color names and
perceptions.
        People were given a very large set of colored tiles that were
presented in a chromatic gradient that covered the spectrum. There was only
a very small difference between each tile. Then, the tiles were scooped into
a box, mixed up, and given to the test subject. The test subject had to
re-create the chromatic gradient.
        What they found was that if a person's primary language had one name
for two colors, the person had more errors in re-creating the gradient in
those colors than in other colors. So, if someone's language had the same
name for orange and yellow, that is the range in which most of the
transpositions would take place.
        Conversely, those who had some art background who could name shades
did better at the test.
        Basically, the test showed that accuracy in minute color perception
was linked to being able to name colors.

        And on to con-langing:
        How does your perception of color, linguistic or personal, affect
your languages?
        I'm quite curious if anyone who is color-blind has found this gets
projected into their language. Would it affect color naming? Perhaps in
con-cultures, would it be a cultural trait?
        (In my DnD campaigns, my cultures tend to be very well developed. In
one of my kingdoms, the Prabanu Ori, color blindness was seen as a handicap.
Dyslexia was a serious disorder: dyslexics were usually not taught to read,
and were specifically removed from the voting class. [Mainly because it was
a "serious deficiency", but also because one had to be literate to vote.]
Since the alphabet of Kalodi [name of the language, script based on Laotian]
was intricate and had a large inventory, with vowel markers appearing above
or below or to the left or to the right or in combination around the letter
[main reason Elves couldn't modify the gnomic typewriter], dyslexia was a
significant challenge to reading. It was also a "flaw" in a purist society.)