[240] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Colors?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon Mar 23 18:49:09 1992
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Allan C. Wechsler <ACW@YUKON.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 1992 17:40-0500
In-Reply-To: <12748.9203120738@s4.sys.uea.ac.uk>
There are human languages with only two colour words,
but their speakers are as capable of distinguishing colours as the rest
of humanity. If they need to name them, they would use words like
"dark", "pale", etc. or concrete images, just as we do in English if we
need to make finer distinctions. For example, Russian has completely
different words for light blue and dark blue - that doesnt mean that
Russians have greater acuity in distinguishing them.
The votes are not all in on this. In the fifties there was a
"Sapir-Whorf scare", in which it was claimed that the effect of one's
color-naming repertoire had detectable effects on perception. These
1954-58 studies were later shown to be flawed, and for twenty-five years
the "common knowledge" was that there was no perceptible effect. Now a
new series of studies is being done, that seems much more careful than
the original series, and again the claim is that the color-name
repertoire of a language has a measurable impact on the color perception
abilities of its speakers.
I confess that this is a side issue.
