tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 18 12:23:40 1994

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Re: color: SuD



> Color perception IS linguistically determined. 

This is, of course, way off mark.  Color perception is detemined by 
the physiology of the eye interacting with wavelengths of light.  The 
way languages create words for colors is constrained by the 
physiological system.  According to Steven Pinker:

"Eyes do not register wavelength the way a thermometer registers 
temperature.  They contain three kinds of cones, each with a different 
pigment, and the cones are wired to neurons in a way that makes the 
neurons respond best to red patches against a green background, or 
vice versa, blue against yellow, black against white.  No matter how 
influential language might be, it would seem preposterous to a 
physiologist that it could reach down into the retina and rewire the 
ganglion cells."

We've been hearing so much speculation about colors lately, I think it 
worthwhile to type in this following passage, from the same book ("The 
Language Instinct," by Steven Pinker):

"Indeed, humans the world over (and babies and monkies, for that 
matter) color their perceptual worlds using the same palette, and this 
constrains the vocabularies they develop.  Although languages may 
disagree about the wrappers in the sixty-four crayon box--the burnt 
umbers, the turquoises, the fuchsias--they agree much more on the 
wrappers in the eight-crayon box--the fire-engine reds, grass greens, 
lemon yellows.  Speakers of different languages unanimously pick these 
shades as the best examples of their color words, as long as the 
language has a color word in that general part of the spectrum.  And 
where languages do differ in their color words, they differ 
predictably, not according to the idiosyncratic tastes of some 
word-coiner.  Languages are organized a bit like the Crayola product 
line, the fancier ones adding colors to the more basic ones.  If a 
language has only two color words, they are for black and white 
(usually encompassing dark and light, respectively).  If it has three, 
they are for black, white, and red; if four, black, white, red, and 
either yellow or green.  Five adds in both yellow and green; six, 
blue; seven, brown; more than seven, purple, pink, orange, or gray.  
But the clinching experiment was carried out in the New Guinea 
highlands with the Grand Valley Dani, a people speaking one of the 
black-and-white languages.  The psychologist Eleanor Rosch found that 
the Dani were quicker at learning a new color category that was based on 
fire-engine red than a category based on an off-red.  The way we see 
colors determines how we learn words for them, not vice versa." 

Steven Pinker is a professor of linguistics at MIT.  

Pinker, Steven.  1994.  "The language instinct: How the mind creates 
language."  New York: William Morrow.

--Holtej



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