The section "On Intelligibility" about the words used for different colors not being easily translated into other langauges or even being able to be translated at all reminded me of something I read about color perception.
It said that different ethnic groups often perceive color differently because of the way their eyes adapt to the sunlight in the particular area they are from. Eye color and the shape of the eye socket are ley factors. For example, people in Asia, whose eyes open at a different angle than those of someone who is native to New York, might perceive a color to be slightly lighter or darker than the person from New York would. Sometimes the differences in perception can actually allow people to perceive more acute shades of color. Someone might think that two color samples are the same when in actuality they are different, but only some people are able to tell the difference.
Perhaps this difference in perception due to adaption to the sun, eye color, and other factors is why different cultures refer to colors in different ways and why certain languages don't have words for colors that we as a culture perceive and name.
And yes, I'm probably gonna have very random posts in relation to whatever we're talking about. Freud called it "free assocication".
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ah...we shall get into free association very quickly I think!
ReplyDeleteThe question you raise is an interesting one. Of course one thing to think about is that you can learn to "see" colours you haven't been able to see before (unless you are colour blind). People like graphic designers who work with a more finely tuned range of shades or colours (like those on the Pantone chart over on the main class blog) have an easy time "seeing" colours that most of us miss. You could also think of the way different languages are vocalized. Languages very different from English, like Chinese, have sounds that are (at first) sometimes hard for an English speaker to even hear.
That's because English is so flat and monotonous compared to other languages, like the romance languages (Italian, Spanish, French). English is so complex yet so boring at the same time. We dont use all the prefixes and suffixes and conjugations older languages like Latin used or even Spanish. And we dont put as much emphasis on pronunciation either. We just make up new words when we want to refine a word.
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