Pat Hayes wrote:
> I would translate both 'siny' and 'niebieski' as 'blue' and 'blekitny'
> as 'pastel blue' or 'sky blue' or 'light blue' depending on the context,
> unless a more precise translation were important. English refers to
> frozen people having blue lips. This kind of phenomenon is common,
> almost universal: different cultures and languages carve up the color
> space into different named regions. (The same happens with, for example,
> spatial prepositions: Dutch has a version of 'in' which applies only to
> the case of a tight or exact fit.) Nevertheless, the choice of the
> prototypical colors is, apparently, not cultural. A Pole will draw a
> different boundary around 'niebieski' than an Englishman will around
> 'blue', but if you ask them to choose one color point to be the most
> representative such color, they will choose the same one. Everyone on
> the planet will choose fire-engine red, alarm yellow and policeman-blue
> as the most typical or characteristic colors. (01)
Much as this may seem likely, claims such as 'a Pole will' and 'everyone
will' beg for more reference than mere intuition. (02)
> For an artist, there are many color names, often very precise, some of
> them named after particular pigments. Cerulean is the color of a shallow
> sea over white sand. Prussian blue is a dark, rich green-tinted
> translucent blue, like dark blue glass. Ultramarine is a bright vivid
> intense saturated blue, a little too dark to be 'simply blue' but
> otherwise very close to the prototype. Less precise, and more in common
> usage, there are 'sky blue', which refers to a moderate pastel blue
> (not, in fact, the color of a clear sunny sky, which is more saturated)
> and Pthalo blue, which is somewhere between cerulean and prussian.
> Similarly, any painter will know the difference between chrome yellow,
> lemon yellow and naples yellow; or between chrome red, alizarin and rose
> madder; or sap green, viridian and chrome green. Or, for that matter,
> between zinc white and titanium white, or lamp black and ivory black.
> But I doubt that any of these distinctions are widely known by people
> who do not use artists pigments.
>
> I wonder, is all this English? Or is it Artist English, a special dialect? (03)
May be the latter. Maybe even not Artist English, but just Artistese.
Most such specialized color names, I suppose, are used in more or less
the same form in languages other than English. (04)
Back to 'siny': this is not Artist Polish. This word is in common use,
every Pole, so to speak, knows it (and knows what it means). (05)
vQ (06)
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