Colour...naming and perceiving

[ardcarp]

Michael Rosen's Word of Mouth on R4 was fascinating today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05stkqm

It was billed as 'Words for Colour' but it went deeper than mere linguistics. His two guests spoke very clearly and concisely...no waffle.

[budscott]

Excellent! The Greeks could see blue!

[Pabmusic]

Nice programme, but it's redundant if you take an evolutionary view. We are primates (apes, actually) and therefore can see the red part of the spectrum. We know this because we have optical cones that react to the red part of the spectrum. Other mammals do not have the red cones - in general they have blue and yellow. Bulls, notoriously, don't see red (they simply don't have the red cones). Red capes mean nothing to them.

Many birds and other lizard-type things can see red. However, most insects can't see red: but they can see ultra-violet. We have no idea what ultra-violet looks like, but we do know that if you shine UV light on flowers many of them have 'hidden' patterns. But we still don't know what UV actually looks like.

Presumably we can see red since the primary diet of primates is fruit, mainly from forest environments. Other mammals don't do this and therefore natural selection would have selected against red. Therefore my two poodles (Low German pudelhund - puddle dog) can't see red, whereas I can.

None of this addresses the old philosophical question of whether what I see as - say - red is what you see. Richard Dawkins speculates that bats apply a label such as the bat equivalent of 'red' or 'blue' to textures (which are important to them) in the same way we apply them to colours. It is something necessary to negotiate a way through the bat world. None of us see reality: we see only a virtual image constructed by our super-computer - our brain.

[french frank]

Nice programme, but it's redundant if you take an evolutionary view.

Not sure that that tells the whole story. Some languages don't distinguish at all between certain colours - blue and green in particular. Others have a range of words which most other languages lump together as shades of the same thing. More about language relativity as being subject to cultural influences than evolution. (But as I haven't heard the programme ... :-) - I'm just objecting to the idea that the human/evolutionary 'universalist' theory makes the relativist one 'redundant'.)

[Gordon]

.... Some languages don't distinguish at all between certain colours - blue and green in particular...

In Welsh "glas" means either blue or green and can even mean grey in some parts of Wales! Which means that Conservatives can be confused with Greens.

[french frank]

In Welsh "glas" means either blue or green and can even mean grey in some parts of Wales!

In Old French, blo (=bleu) seems to be something like 'bruise-coloured" - blue/green/yellow/grey. And I think blue/bleu is cognate with Latin flavus = yellow.

[vinteuil]

... and the Russkies, with their distinction between Oxford and Cambridge blues -

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070430/full/news070430-2.html

[french frank]

... and the Russkies, with their distinction between Oxford and Cambridge blues -

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/0704...s070430-2.html

Fascinating. I hesitated as to whether the one on the left was dark or in between.
[Colour meter test confirms dark]

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Fascinating.

I hesitated as to whether the one on the left was dark or in between.
[Colour meter test confirms dark]

Fascinatinger and fascinatinger! I see the left and central squares as the same colour and the right square as lighter.

[french frank]

Fascinatinger and fascinatinger! I see the left and central squares as the same colour and the right square as lighter.

That's more or less what I meant. Except I wasn't quiiiiite sure about the one on the left. Perhaps I was thinking about it too much

[ardcarp]

In Old French, blo (=bleu) seems to be something like 'bruise-coloured" - blue/green/yellow/grey. And I think blue/bleu is cognate with Latin flavus = yellow.

Nowt to do wi' topic, but I'm reminded of the beautiful (and forward looking) Woefully Arrayed by William Cornysh where the words "my body blo and wan" are set most poignantly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15YOCI2XzbM

[Anastasius]

Many, many years ago the BBC Engineering Training Department had a very elegant colorimeter experiment. It was a light box separated into two halves so that the illuminating light was the same for both halves. A single slider on the left half could have various colour filter materials inserted. The right half had three sliders with primary red, green and blue with a calibrated scale. The test was to adjust the sliders in the right half so that the mixed colour as seen in the two viewing windows was the same for the two halves. The required R, G and B values were then noted down and compared with others. It was very surprising to see the wide differences between people's own colour perceptions.

[budscott]

None of us see reality: we see only a virtual image constructed by our super-computer - our brain.

Why worry? It probably ain't out there!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Do you think of turquoise as being blue or green?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Do you think of turquoise as being blue or green?

I think of it as being turquoise.