>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.
>
>Much as this may seem likely, claims such as 'a Pole will' and
>'everyone will' beg for more reference than mere intuition. (01)
Well-known empirical results in psychology. I believe the pioneering
work was done by Eleanor Rosch in 1975. (02)
Rosch, E. (1975). The nature of mental codes for color categories. J.
Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 303-322 (03)
Since then the basic thesis has been confirmed in several ways, eg
color memory tends to drift towards the prototypes (Rosch's term is
'focal color') , prototype colors give strongest linguistic priming
effects, etc... It seems clear that some kind of built-in neural(?)
mechanism is at work. Still, there are also of course many cultural
determinants of color vocabularies and usages. I just saw this
collection, for example, which looks fascinating:
http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=Z%20137 (04)
Pat
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