Mmm, linguistics.

[elwen]

joulesm posted a link to this article on color and, more specifically, terminology for colors. I think it's a bad sign for my career as a chem-e that I found that mix of anthropology and linguistics so much more interesting than most of what I've studied here at Tech. Then again, I also think the whole "puzzle" is kind of self-evident if you just think about it.

For example, they say that the spectrum is continuous, so cultures will divide it arbitrarily. Well, duh. Whatever Roy G. Biv may say, most people, and basic Crayola sets, don't acknowledge indigo as its own color.

The lack of colorful descriptions in literature probably has less to do with a psychological inability to perceive color than a psychological inability to care about color. I didn't read much of the Greek classics, but my general feeling was that the writers tended to be less interested in telling us what things looked like than in listing the lineage and past glory of every last soldier.

It's also pretty easy to speculate about the "rules" for color words. The theory about societal complexity sounds good to me. You don't care about fine shades until you get artistic. Also, I would think of the colors as being in order of prevalence and importance in a more natural world. Don't we all learn that animals use red as a warning signal? Yellow/green is everywhere. And so on.

I guess I always knew that I prefer to understand things rather than apply what I know. But by definition, that's just not productive. I'd probably get sick of the whole researching and finding evidence to back up my theories thing anyway. It's more fun just to speculate.

Comments

[fenugreek.livejournal.com]

color terminology is interesting. I find it neat because it's something that most people experience and can theorize about, as opposed to the crap we learn at Tech, which is cool but completely unappreciated by most people.

An102 has a lot about color terminology. It's kinda fun, you do a color free-listing thing. Basically, everybody starts writing down as many colors as they can as fast as they can for a couple seconds, say 30 seconds, and then you compile all the answers and see which ones are listed most frequently and in which order. Anthropologists say that the order in the list indicates the importance of the color. For instance, red is almost universally the first one listed. But then anthropologists take this too far (IMO), and notice that words like 'indigo' and 'violet' frequently pop up 6th and 7th in these lists. This is sometimes taken to mean that indigo and violet are extremely important color terms. The way I see it, it's just the result of people listing ROYGBIV. I mean, how many people know what indigo even looks like. And who uses violet instead of purple?

[joulesm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been finding myself getting more and more interested in the social sciences too...:-/