From: mls@cbnewsm.cb.att.com (mike.siemon)
Subject: Re: Liberty (was something relevant about CO-2 long ago...)
Organization: AT&T
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 21:12:37 GMT
Summary: color terms

In article <1992Dec21.185252.6796@spdcc.com> joe@spdcc.com (Joseph Francis)
writes:

>Does it? I know I'm treading out of my side of the pod, but this must
>relate of course to some languages of African savannah tribes where
>there are only two words for color - one equivalent to xanthic colors
>(yellows, 'warm' colors,) and cyanotic colors (blues, 'cool' colors).
>These relate, fairly accurately, to the primary colors in the

Languages *do* have different numbers of "basic color terms" (jargon
courtesy of the classic study by Berlin in the ?60s; arnold could
tell us how well their work has held up, but the last time the issue
went round in sci.lang, I still saw Berlin cited by people I respect.)

Archaic Greek seems to have had three such basic color terms, for
example (and it *does* have an influence on the metaphors of Homer,
for example.)  English, as usual, tends to have about as full a set
of the basic terms as any language.  But languages *also* have lots
of ways of pinning down a particular color which could as well be
named by one of the basic terms (thaang and respondents gave us a nice
sampling of single-word terms in English that expand the "basic" set;
if one admits more complex expressions, there is really no limit --
again in any "real" language.)

Beyond that, the perceptual and operative distinctions can be tested
in psychology labs.  Fine discriminations need to be learned (at least
by the strayts :-)), and the immensely rich vocabulary of secondary
terms in English is not usually available to the untrained speaker,
but the training need only be in terms of selection -- subjects need
not be (and sometimes *are* not) able to express color distinctions
that they can quite consistently make in action.

>landscape - savannah/sky. Do people who use this language 'see' the
>same specturm as those who had a more spectrally distributed
>environment?

in brief, yes.  (except for the various flavors of "color-blindness"
which are genetically but not culturally distributed.)  It is very
romantic to think otherwise, but there's no evidence of it -- again
excepting the "weak" form of the hypothesis, in which it is difficult
too claim that there is anything more going on than the *manner* in
which referents are handled in a culture, the exact analog of gay
color-culture being (potentially) different from straight.  It is more
a matter of what we WANT to attend to than of what we CAN attend to.

(Caveat: the brain forms its intricate web of neuronal patterning in
a highly interactive manner with the environment; that is part of what
goes on as we develop "circuits" for recognizing horizontal and vertical
lines, for example.  It is in principle possible that the culture in
which ones's earliest perceptual experience takes place DOES modify
the "wiring" in a way that would matter here -- I don't know of any
evidence of that, but I wouldn't rule it out of court.  However, we
are here at a pre-language level and language in such a case would be
effect more than cause.


>Then we can speak of Aleutians and snow, another thing entirely.

another bit of much-debunked urban legend.  There are only a few basic
terms in Inuit (much like English has basic terms "ice" and "snow" and
maybe "sleet" and "slush" and ...), plus a larger set of combinations
of these and standard word-formation patterns (Inuit is also, I seem to
recall, an agglutinating language, which makes the definition of "a word"
somewhat more complex than almost-isolating languages like English.)

The "many" snow-names of Inuit are quite similar to the many names of and
strategies for naming colors in (all) languages.
-- 
Michael L. Siemon		   "Oh, stand, stand at the window,
					As the tears scald and start;
mls@panix.com			   You shall love your crooked neighbor
(please note address)			With your crooked heart."
Newsgroups: soc.bi