Re: CHAT: Orange

On Thu, 6 Jun 2002 08:41:57 +0200, Christophe Grandsire
<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 indigo as one of those colors like "vermilion" or "sepia" that
derive from specific substances (dye from a plant, mercuric sulfide, and
squid ink respectively), or one of those specialized technical colors like
"cyan" and "magenta". "Teal" is primarily a kind of duck, and only
secondarily a shade of blue-green. In contrast, "orange" and "pink" are
basic color words for me, even though "orange" is the name of a fruit and
"pink" is a kind of flower. "Violet" is a bit of a gray area.

>>
>> > I would have a hard time describing pink without a word for it
>>
>> "Light red", that's how I sometimes think of it.  :-)
>>
>
>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).
My idea of "red" and "pink" is pretty closely modeled by the Tirelat colors
"biri" and "zafi", as illustrated on the Tirelat color chart. My "pink" has
a tiny bit more "B" (of RGB) than my "red", but otherwise they're pretty
close. CRT monitor red (the "R" of RGB) isn't really a very good red to me,
it's got a lot of orange in it. "Light red" (or alternatively, "pale red")
is a fairly good description of the range of colors I'd label as "pink".

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/png/tirelhat-colors.png

The "green" on the chart ("zimi") is also pretty close to my idea of "basic
green", and the others are evenly spaced in hue. ("Purple" to me falls
somewhere between the Tirelat colors "rezhi" and "zhuli", although as a
Tirelat color, "rezhi" is considered a member of the red family.)

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