At 12:38 PM -0400 3/17/08, Ed Barkmeyer wrote:
>Sean Barker wrote:
>
>>> That is, there is a continuing evolution of the
>>> conceptualisation of colour from an adjectival to nominal concept -
>>> noting that in ancient Egypt, colour terms were verbs (to become red)
>>> rather than adjectives. (English has verbal forms for the first three
>>> terms in the BCT sequence - blackening, whitening, reddening, but not
>>> *bluening, with greening having restricted usage not *greening a shirt).
>
>And Pat Hayes said:
>> In my native dialect, "blueing" is fine. One can
>> blue a shirt (it actually, for odd reasons, means
>> to make it a brighter white by 'removing the
>> yellow') ...
>
>I think Sean had an important idea that got a bit muddled with a related
>one.
>
>There are several languages in which certain kinds of "adjectives",
>colours among them, always have a verbal form. "The red car" is "the
>car that 'is red'". Apparently ancient Coptic is among them. A similar
>approach is often used to capture "adjectival attributions" in
>formalizations of natural language, where the adjective is turned into a
>predicate: E.g., "All red cars are cop-magnets" becomes:
> (FORALL x)(IF (AND (car x) (red x)) (cop-magnet x))
>And the predicate red() has the meaning 'is red', just as car() means
>'is a car'.
>
>That is the point I thought should not be lost: Formalization turns
>adjectives, including colour attribution, into predicates ("verbs"). (01)
I wouldn't say for a second that predicates in FOL have any clear
connection with verbs in English. (02)
>(It wasn't just a peculiarity of ancient Egyptian.)
>
>Now, in many of these languages, 'is red' is indistinguishable from
>'turns red' or 'turned red'. (03)
I wonder if these languages had a construction that we might render
as 'staying red' or 'maintaining red' which disambiguated in the
other direction? (04)
> This is probably a result of observation
>that redness is a result of change, whether persistent or not. When
>humans 'turn red', there is clearly a change, but in nature, flowers and
>berries 'turn red' as they grow, and cloth is 'turned red' as a
>consequence of application of some dye. This seems to apply to turning
>yellow, green, blue and brown as well, but not usually to white and black.
>
>But in Western languages, AFTER colour attribution was an "adjective",
>we developed derived terms for processes that produce colour change.
>The examples that Sean and Pat used are of this kind: blacken, redden,
>blue(-ing), yellow(-ing), etc. (It may be that this is just a
>chicken/egg issue in language development.)
>
>BTW, Pat's observation about laundry "bluing" that makes brighter whites
>is derived from a mid-19th century product, "Reckitts blue", that was a
>synthetic blue dye added to washloads in small quantities to overcome
>the yellow or grey tint that whites acquired from many washings in
>public water supplies. (05)
I recall the smell (and taste) of the stuff from my childhood. Dying
ones tongue blue was a common distraction, and often alarmed ones
mother in a satisfactory way. (06)
> (The practice may be older, but Prussian Blue
>and French Blue dyes were expensive; the synthetic was cheap.) By 1900
>similar products were marketed under a dozen names in England, the US,
>and much of Europe, and they were all called "blue" or "bluing".
>Household bleaches and other chemical whiteners finally drove them out
>of the market around 1960. (07)
Blued steel is much older, though, and is still used (both the
material and the linguistic formation). (08)
Pat
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