Language and metaphor

[Telarus]

I agree with a lot in this thread. I want to jump in on the Pink thing, because I recently found a scientist who manages to explain the crux of the Pink Paradox so I understood it (and, as Nigel said, it's not that people who don't have words for colors 'can't see them').

http://www.biotele.com/magenta.html

Magenta is an "extraspectral" color. Sir Isaac Newton noticed that magenta did not exist in the spectrum of colors from white light when he played with prisms. But when he superimposed the red end of the spectrum on to the blue end, he saw the color magenta (this can be done with two prisms to make two spectral spreads, "rainbows"):



Magenta is the only color that does not exist as a single wavelength of light.

....

A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence. Pink (or magenta, to use its official name) simply isn't there. But if pink isn't in the light spectrum, how come we can see it?

...
All the colours in the light spectrum have complements that exist within the spectrum – except green. There seems to be some kind of imbalance. What is going on? Is green somehow being discriminated against?

The light spectrum consists of a range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Red light has the longest wavelength; violet the shortest. The colours in between have wavelengths between those of red and violet light.

When our eyes see colours, they are actually detecting the different wavelengths of the light hitting the retina. Colours are distinguished by their wavelengths, and the brain processes this information and produces a visual display that we experience as colour.

This means that colours only really exist within the brain – light is indeed travelling from objects to our eyes, and each object may well be transmitting/reflecting a different set of wavelengths of light; but what essentially defines a 'colour' as opposed to a 'wavelength' is created within the brain.

If the eye receives light of more than one wavelength, the colour generated in the brain is formed from the sum of the input responses on the retina. For example, if red light and green light enter the eye at the same time, the resulting colour produced in the brain is yellow, the colour halfway between red and green in the spectrum.

So what does the brain do when our eyes detect wavelengths from both ends of the light spectrum at once (i.e. red and violet light)? Generally speaking, it has two options for interpreting the input data:

a) Sum the input responses to produce a colour halfway between red and violet in the spectrum (which would in this case produce green – not a very representative colour of a red and violet mix)
b) Invent a new colour halfway between red and violet

Magenta is the evidence that the brain takes option b – it has apparently constructed a colour to bridge the gap between red and violet, because such a colour does not exist in the light spectrum. Magenta has no wavelength attributed to it, unlike all the other spectrum colours.

Another page on that site says this:

The previous pages have explained three very different methods for defining a color:
(1) the measurement of the color stimulus as a spectral emittance or reflectance curve in colorimetry;

(2) the proportional responses to the stimulus by the L, M and S cones, represented as a chromaticity diagram; and

(3) the subjective description of the color sensation in terms of lightness, hue and hue purity, the three colormaking attributes.

These methods [of definition] focus on the physical stimulus, receptor outputs or color sensation, respectively.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

OMG, that is so fucking cool! Thanks for posting it!

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Beyond cool. And the first link clicks over to all kinds of stuff, I got lost in it for awhile. 

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I agree with you on those examples of previous tests and assumptions, Nigel. However, this paper is about a somewhat different test. It's not stating that the English speakers don't "see" the difference in color, but rather that the Russians detect the color difference/matching more quickly across goluboy/sinay than English speakers across light blue/dark blue.

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780/F1.large.jpg

In the above linked figure, Russian speakers more quickly match the top color to the left color, English speakers reaction time is slower. They tested both spatial (like above) and verbal, with the following results:

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780/F2.large.jpg

The paper doesn't argue that English speakers 'don't' see the colors, but rather the speed at which they identify the difference is slower.

From the abstract:

We found that Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian (one siniy and the other goluboy) than when they were from the same linguistic category (both siniy or both goluboy). Moreover, this category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but not a spatial, dual task. These effects were stronger for difficult discriminations (i.e., when the colors were perceptually close) than for easy discriminations (i.e., when the colors were further apart). English speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show a category advantage in any of the conditions. These results demonstrate that (i) categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks and (ii) the effect of language is online (and can be disrupted by verbal interference).

The abstract, full paper and figures can be found here:

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.abstract

The full paper talks about previous tests which relied on memory and subjective judgement. The test was designed to account for that difference by using the objective color matching figures like the one above.

. The critical difference in this case is not that English speakers cannot distinguish between light and dark blues, but rather that Russian speakers cannot avoid distinguishing them: they must do so to speak Russian in a conventional manner. This communicative requirement appears to cause Russian speakers to habitually make use of this distinction even when performing a perceptual task that does not require language. The fact that Russian speakers show a category advantage across this color boundary (both under normal viewing conditions without interference and despite spatial interference) suggests that language-specific categorical representations are normally brought online in perceptual decisions.

Sorry if this has already been covered -- I can't be arsed to read the whole thread.

The distinction between голобои and... (shit, I can't remember the name for dark blue... anyway) the other one is more like the distinction between pink and red than the distinction between blue and turquoise. Pink literally is light red, but we are culturally primed from birth to distinguish between the two in English, and so if you tell someone to point out the red tile in a selection of blue, green, and pink tiles they will not necessarily immediately point to the pink one. (Tangentially and amusingly, goloboi -- light blue -- is used in Russian as a slang for homosexual, much as pink is associated in the united states with femininity and is considered effeminate when worn by males).

Regarding the creation of a whole new language (as mentioned in the OP) for the sole purpose of screwing around with metaphors: that's been done, and is done rather frequently. The most notable example is Lojban, but others include Toki Pona and (if we cheat a little) Klingon. It's been fairly common for conlangers to experimentally test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (though obviously not in a way that is considered scientifically valid by professional linguists).

[Telarus]

++Pink literally is light red, but we are culturally primed from birth to distinguish between the two in English++


Did you even read the selection I posted?

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I didn't mean that in reference to the magenta thing (if I recall, I sent you that link... I don't identify magenta with pink, anyhow). I mean it in reference to the dark blue / light blue dichotomy in Russian (mentioned in the first page of the thread).

The TL;DR version of my post is: it is more reasonable to compare the Russian distinction between light blue and dark blue to the English distinction between pink and red than it is to compare it to the distinction between blue and turquoise, due to similar cultural baggage.

[Elder Iptuous]

Telarus,
i think that where the article says "...Pink (or magenta, to use its official name) simply isn't there" that it is doing a little dance.
when i think of pink, i think of a light red. (which, i guess is extra-spectral too, since it would be red with some floor of the rest of the spectrum to add some white to it, right?)

[Doktor Howl]

I am utterly lost as to what the fuck is actually being discussed here.

You People make NO SENSE.