Language is loaded with metaphor. Time is money. Ideas are buildings. Life is a journey. Good is up, bad is down. Anger is a hot fluid in a container. They're not necessarily the right ones. A while ago I read about a tribe in South America who talk about the future as being behind them, and the past as being in front of them. Sort of makes sense, considering we can "look at" the past and not-so-much the future. We walk backwards into the future, our eyes fixed on the past, as the (supposedly) Maori proverb goes.
Perhaps replacing the current underlying metaphors present in our language with radically different ones could provide us with a completely different reality tunnel?
There's a little problem here, though. The ideal would be to create an entire new, weird-ass language. Most likely, I would be the only speaker of that language. And what's the purpose of a language if you can't use it to communicate? Even if I were to start using metaphors like TIME IS AN INCREASINGLY CROWDED SEGREGATION ERA BUS AND YOU'RE A NEGRO ("This has been a very fun night. Unfortunately I have to leave now because whites want my seat and I'm not a temporal Rosa Parks.") and LIFE IS A GRAPE ("One day we will all meet the grape-stone. Christians believe that Jesus Christ sacrificed himself to give all humans stoneless grapes.") in everyday language, people would have difficulty understanding me. Anyway, I think just being aware of the fact that these metaphors are there can provide us with some perspective. Using the underlying metaphors of our language creatively, for instance by stretching them ad absurdum ("the Art Deco marble columns of Marx' theory about money are sloppily crafted"), can help us and others become aware of them, and recognize that other metaphors could potentially be just as fitting in their place.
Thoughts?
Yeah, metaphor is useful. You get to a point where you cant stretch a metaphor further though and need to back off, change it around.
I actually read the time thing before and agree with it. It makes more sense than 'facing the future' I almost visualise myself falling back into time staring into the past looking for clues of how to deal with the next thing.
The chicken. I don't know what it's called, but there's an idea that what we know is unreliable because we only know what we've learned from experience and our experience is limited to, well, our experience. Chicken eats, poops, lays an egg, has a dust bath. Ever day for a year. What part of it's life indicates that it will be chopped up and tasty? Nothing. But, talking about experience is harder than talking about a chicken (I got this story from Black Swan by Talib, whose title is itself a metaphor for the unpredictable).
Often if I get stuck thinking with one metaphor I move to another.
The past being in front of us...rather brilliant.
I've always been a huge fan of the metaphor. I would argue, though, that just as often as metaphors limit the reality we experience, they open us up to parts of our reality we weren't aware of.
I don't know if radically different metaphors would give us a "reality tunnel" without a lot of comparable instances, but it could change things a lot. If you study other languages at all, they kind of have a similar thing going on. Or maybe thats the product of overall cultural difference...
Let's not forget that language itself is a metaphor.
In their most pedantic sense, words are tangible things that represent intangible ideas -- to overuse an example, if I say "a leaf fell off the tree," the words "leaf" "fell" and "tree" describe collective agreements, and not the precise physical objects as the progress through space-time.
Yes, I know how that sounds. I apologize.
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on March 19, 2012, 02:48:36 PM
In their most pedantic sense, words are tangible things that represent intangible ideas -- to overuse an example, if I say "a leaf fell off the tree," the words "leaf" "fell" and "tree" describe collective agreements, and not the precise physical objects as the progress through space-time.
Yes, I know how that sounds. I apologize.
In the most pedantic sense, I cannot agree with the idea that words are metaphors. I'm sure I will regret delving even deeper into philosophical wankery, but words are symbols. Metaphor is the description of a tangible idea used to represent a less tangible idea. A leaf is tangible, the word "leaf" is conceptual, so that runs counter to the idea of metaphor. Words are not metaphor any more than numbers are metaphor.
Oh, I don't think I care to delve any deeper than I already have, as I don't think the resulting conversation would be much fun for either of us.
Incidentally, numbers are metaphors, too.
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on March 19, 2012, 03:17:58 PM
Oh, I don't think I care to delve any deeper than I already have, as I don't think the resulting conversation would be much fun for either of us.
Incidentally, numbers are metaphors, too.
I disagree with your use of the word "metaphor". You seem to be using it backward.
I had a feeling you'd say that.
Anyway, in terms of the OP, it seems like metaphor relies on common shared experiences, so if you try to come up with new ones, you either end up with "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra", or "Your Majesty is like a stream of bat piss" -- either no one has the slightest idea of what you're referencing, or the positive connections you make appear to be negative to everyone else.
The point being, if you're trying to use these to communicate, they won't work very well.
Not only is the past in front of us, but the future is here. We're borrowing it, because tomorrow never comes.
Quote from: Lenin McCarthy on March 17, 2012, 10:28:10 PM
Perhaps replacing the current underlying metaphors present in our language with radically different ones could provide us with a completely different reality tunnel?
Thoughts?
I don't think so. I think perhaps one can create new metaphors, or, weave new angles into old metaphors. The thing is, different metaphors work for different people. Because, of course, different people have different past life experiences and reference points with which to interpret the metaphors.
So starting from scratch and inventing an entire new system of metaphor would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. (HO FUCK, SEE THAT?)
However, perhaps tweaking with existing metaphors sets off some signals for folks that have never been set off before.
I think that was part of the idea, intentional or not, with BIP. The BIP metaphor, at its most basic incarnation, has been helpful for many because it can tap into and sync with metaphors and ideas people already understand. So you get that little poppy, "AHA!" moment. That is that signal being activated. A new thought, a new perspective that has some basis in ideas already understood.
Quote from: What's-His-Name? on March 19, 2012, 04:25:59 PM
Quote from: Lenin McCarthy on March 17, 2012, 10:28:10 PM
Perhaps replacing the current underlying metaphors present in our language with radically different ones could provide us with a completely different reality tunnel?
Thoughts?
So starting from scratch and inventing an entire new system of metaphor would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. (HO FUCK, SEE THAT?)
:lulz:
Yeah, that's more or less along the lines of what I was thinking as well.
LMNO and Nigel's use of 'metaphor' conflict because the conversation lacks clear context. Nigel's using def1 and LMNOs using def2.
Google Dictionary search (https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Ametaphor&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-beta#hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-beta&hs=1jq&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=metaphor&tbs=dfn:1&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=VPdnT4S6FOKtiAKkueynBw&ved=0CCoQkQ4&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=48514c2d9de728e2&biw=1418&bih=848)
1. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.
2. A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, esp. something abstract.
Both are using "correct" definitions, but we lack the context to tell which definition is preferred in the current situation (in what way, exactly, are we investigating the intersection of the concepts?)..... Words don't have "inherent meaning", but we can treat them as "things" when we are involved in symbolic manipulation (playing with poetic structure or computer code). Once they are released to transmit their meaning they become LMNO's 'meta-phors', only representative of the meaning. The meaning lies not in the symbols, but in the shared experiences which allow the participants in the communication to receive and integrate the meaning "well enough".
George Orwells talks on this;
QuoteDying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.
And on euphemism, some more comments
QuoteIn our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."
From politics and the English language.
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
Quote from: What's-His-Name? on March 19, 2012, 04:25:59 PM
don't think so. I think perhaps one can create new metaphors, or, weave new angles into old metaphors. The thing is, different metaphors work for different people. Because, of course, different people have different past life experiences and reference points with which to interpret the metaphors.
So starting from scratch and inventing an entire new system of metaphor would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. (HO FUCK, SEE THAT?)
However, perhaps tweaking with existing metaphors sets off some signals for folks that have never been set off before.
I think that was part of the idea, intentional or not, with BIP. The BIP metaphor, at its most basic incarnation, has been helpful for many because it can tap into and sync with metaphors and ideas people already understand. So you get that little poppy, "AHA!" moment. That is that signal being activated. A new thought, a new perspective that has some basis in ideas already understood.
:lulz:
I agree. I think I just got a bit caught away by my enthusiasm in the OP. Tweaking and playing with existing metaphors, or even creating new ones, are powerful tools.
@Placid Dingo:
How politicians use language is very fascinating indeed. In Norway, every time a major politician does something stupid, they tell the media that they're "laying themselves flat". The original meaning of the phrase is to apologize without conditions and take the entire responsibility for what has happened, but after a while they started using it
with conditions (as in "I apologize without conditions,
if you consider what I did to be wrong.")! Now it has become a blanket phrase politicians use to evade responsibility, basically.
Even if we don't delve into metaphor, language itself manipulates our perceptions (at least according to General Semantics).
I recently came across an interesting example of this as I began learning Turkish. The turkish language has two different kinds of past tense, based on the individual's knowledge of events. If the person actually SAW the thing, the word ends in 'di'. If the person didn't actually see the thing, the word ends in miş. The language has a built in buffer that separates personal experience of an event from second hand experience of the event.
In discussing this, it appears to actually affect the Turkish perception of assumption. If someone says "gitmiş" (went) it has the implication that the statement is uncertain. If they say "giddi" (went) then it's perceived as fact.
-----------------
The comment LMNO made on language and numbers being metaphor is also a very interesting topic, but definitely a big rabbit hole. However, there is a lot of interesting discussions on the idea of words/numbers as metaphor. Crowley discusses this in his essay "The Soldier and the Hunchback" (2+2 is true, 2+2=4 is false), RAW discusses it in the essay "Never Whistle While You're Pissing" (Two scientists arguing if the 'Damned Thing' growing in the yard is a bush or a tree). Huxley also discusses this in Doors of Perception.
One doctor recently wrote on the topic of syneasthesia, positing that the area of the brain that deals in metaphor, is the same area of the brain that causes the "mental characteristic" of syneasthesia. As an example it shows two "alien letters" (one is a bubbly squiggle with soft round corners and the other has sharp points). He then asks which letter is called "wooble" and which is called "kitkit". 90% of respondents tied the word 'wooble' to the soft round one. (TED Talk: http://youtu.be/N9hy7oOhHxk (http://youtu.be/N9hy7oOhHxk) ).Overall, positing the idea that words are metaphors and syneasthesia is simply a characteristic that connects the symbol and the idea in different metaphoric ways.
In the paper:"Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson they argue that not only do we use metaphor in speech, but we use metaphor in thought. They conclude that the way we actually experience life is through metaphor.
So to really bang up the BiP, we could say that we are all trapped in a windowless solitary cell, watching video screens that show us some of what is going on outside of our cell rather than actually looking outside the bars. But of course, that would be mangling the metaphor :lulz:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/knowledgebase/cgi-bin/2011/02/24/is-crime-a-virus-or-a-beast-one-word-can-make-a-big-difference/
QuotePsychology Assistant Professor Lera Boroditsky and doctoral candidate Paul Thibodeau have shown that people will likely support an increase in police forces and jailing of offenders if crime is described as a "beast" preying on a community. But if people are told crime is a "virus" infecting a city, they are more inclined to treat the problem with social reform.
QuoteThey suspected that Republicans would be more inclined to catch and incarcerate criminals than Democrats, who would prefer enacting social reforms. They found Republican participants were about 10 percent more likely to suggest an enforcement-based solution.
But the difference was substantially less than the difference triggered by the metaphor. Participants who read that crime was a beast were about 20 percent more likely to suggest an enforcement-based solution than participants who read that crime was a virus, regardless of their political persuasion.
"That shows that you don't have to have immediate political polarization on every issue," Boroditsky said. "You can figure out how to communicate your message and find the right set of analogies and metaphors that will lead people to the same conclusion."
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016782
Always good to question every metaphor, just to make sure its papers are in order.
Here's another gret article on perception in language, this time on the topic of colors (Colors being metaphors for light reflecting at specific frequencies):
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/05/language-influences-color-perception.ars (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/05/language-influences-color-perception.ars)
Because the Russian language makes a distinction between light blue and dark blue (as two completely different colors, rather than shades of the same color), test show that they perceive colors in a different way than English speakers.
huh....
separating blue into two different 'colors'? that seems odd.
i have heard that Newton's description of the color spectrum originally did not include orange and indigo, but he added them for numerological purposes. indigo always seemed contrived to me, but orange stuck out as distinct enough that it would be odd not to have as a separate color. Then i heard on "A Way With Words" radio program that the word 'orange' (for the color) came into use only after the fruit was introduced. previously, they simply said 'yellow-red' or 'red-yellow'... So i can see how my perception of what should be a fundamentally separate color in the spectrum is influenced by language.
but dark-blue/light-blue?
that's not even a hue. it's a shade. since the article didn't say anything else about terminology distinction of shades in other colors, i assume it is only blue? i wonder why that would be the case...
Uh... Turquoise, anyone?
:?
what about turquoise?
It's a separate category of blue. Or am I misunderstanding your point?
oh.
well, i was saying that if you ask people the basic colors of the rainbow they will give you ROYGBIV, generally. then i pointed that O and I were added arbitrarily to get the magic number 7. i was saying that I seemed contrived to me, but O seemed a natural 'basic' color, but then found that there wasn't even a specific word for it until the fruit was introduced to europe.
this was only tangentially related to what Rat posted, though, i guess...
but as for the russian delineation between light and dark blue, that seemed extra odd to me, since it is a distinction between shade rather than hue, and i was wondering why they had this for one color, but not, presumably, for others.
turquoise is a blue/green color, but would generally not be considered a 'basic' color. we certainly have color names for quite a few hues that don't make it into the acronym.
our cones are centered on Red Blue and Green (with significant overlap, iirc), so i guess if we were looking for a non arbitrary division of the color spectrum, it should be based on that, no?
There is a chaos of light frequencies... we order that chaos into words so we can speak about them. There's a video of RAW being asked to explain quantum physics simply... he uses an illustration about the place he lived and how for some things like the post office it was considered part of one town and for other things like police, it was someplace different and technically it was some unincorproated area. He concluded by saying its easy to deal with this because we know we put the lines on the map. However, with 'reality' we often forget that we put the lines there. Even things like hue and shade are concepts of our own creation, definitions based on how we decided to order the spectrum of color.
I have some major skepticism about the whole color/language issue. It strikes me as rather critically close to a certain anthropological fallacy that is essentially the interpretation of the failure of the anthropologist to understand their subjects as a failure of the subjects to understand a concept.
Quote from: Nigel on March 21, 2012, 04:36:06 AM
I have some major skepticism about the whole color/language issue. It strikes me as rather critically close to a certain anthropological fallacy that is essentially the interpretation of the failure of the anthropologist to understand their subjects as a failure of the subjects to understand a concept.
There's a thread about this somewhere isn't there? Care to remind me what your particular objections were?
Quote from: MMIX on March 22, 2012, 08:56:14 PM
Quote from: Nigel on March 21, 2012, 04:36:06 AM
I have some major skepticism about the whole color/language issue. It strikes me as rather critically close to a certain anthropological fallacy that is essentially the interpretation of the failure of the anthropologist to understand their subjects as a failure of the subjects to understand a concept.
There's a thread about this somewhere isn't there? Care to remind me what your particular objections were?
The argument seems to be that people whose language doesn't have a specific name for a color but lumps it into another color group, can't actually visually distinguish the color. This bears striking similarities to some of the "noble savage" fallacies perpetuated about other groups; "They don't have a word for rape; they don't understand the concept".
Compare and contrast this with the myth that the Inuit have (varying number) of words for snow. The implication is that they recognize more varieties of snow than do English-speakers. This, of course, is false; even if the myth were true, it would simply be a matter of describing the same thing differently.
Now, I'm a colorist by trade. I recognize and can distinguish between hundreds of colors (I also have an anomaly of the cones which causes me to see more yellow than other people see, which leads to occasional hilarity). I know names for colors that other people would probably just call "green". This doesn't mean that the difference in the colors is invisible to them; it just means that they don't have names for them. If I said "hand me the charteuse and the olivine", most people would have no idea what I was saying. If I said "hand me the two pukey-greenish colors there", they would know what I was talking about. If I said "Hand me the more yellowy of the two pukey-greenish colors" most people would hand me the chartreuse, without even knowing the words "chartreuse" or "olivine".
To say "these people have no word for pink; therefore they cannot see pink" seems like a wide-open invitation for fallacy; Consciously, they see red because that color is called "red". That doesn't mean that they are physically unable to distinguish between
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Auto_Racing_Red.svg/800px-Auto_Racing_Red.svg.png)
and
(http://sunshine3.webs.com/hot%20pink.jpg)
it just means that they use the same word to describe them, and until you let them know what difference they should be looking for ("the light red one") there's no frame of reference to impel them to make a distinction.
The interesting thing is that even the studies themselves don't make the claim that the language directly affects color perception, but rather, memory. It's people's misinterpretation of what that means that has led to "people who don't have a name for pink can't see it".
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 (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 (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:
QuoteWe 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 (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.
Quote. 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.
I covered that in my last two sentences. That was my whole quarrel with the way laypeople seem to be interpreting those studies.
Quote from: Bebek Sincap Ratatosk on March 20, 2012, 01:35:19 PM
Here's another gret article on perception in language, this time on the topic of colors (Colors being metaphors for light reflecting at specific frequencies):
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/05/language-influences-color-perception.ars (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/05/language-influences-color-perception.ars)
Because the Russian language makes a distinction between light blue and dark blue (as two completely different colors, rather than shades of the same color), test show that they perceive colors in a different way than English speakers.
See? This is a misunderstanding/misinterpretation of the tests. "Perceive" is the wrong word. "Think about" and "describe" would be more accurate. When you say "perceive" you are talking about physical inputs, when actually what varies is the processing and output.
There are far more factors at play than merely being an English speaker or a Russian speaker, as well. I am part of a community of glass artists all over the world, and we all use the same language to talk about colors... glass language, which is primarily a mixture of English, German, and Italian. This color conversation can be confusing to pigment colorists and light colorists, and even to chemists, because glass combines all three.
Most of these people learned this vocabulary and new cognition of color as adults, regardless of their language of origin. But it didn't change how we perceive the colors (raw input)... it changed how we think about and describe them.
Once you explain to someone that there is blue turquoise and green turquoise, it doesn't mean that they are suddenly able to see the difference. It means that you have labeled the difference as significant, and named it, so they think about it differently.
Quote from: Iptuous on March 20, 2012, 08:04:40 PM
oh.
well, i was saying that if you ask people the basic colors of the rainbow they will give you ROYGBIV, generally. then i pointed that O and I were added arbitrarily to get the magic number 7. i was saying that I seemed contrived to me, but O seemed a natural 'basic' color, but then found that there wasn't even a specific word for it until the fruit was introduced to europe.
this was only tangentially related to what Rat posted, though, i guess...
but as for the russian delineation between light and dark blue, that seemed extra odd to me, since it is a distinction between shade rather than hue, and i was wondering why they had this for one color, but not, presumably, for others.
turquoise is a blue/green color, but would generally not be considered a 'basic' color. we certainly have color names for quite a few hues that don't make it into the acronym.
our cones are centered on Red Blue and Green (with significant overlap, iirc), so i guess if we were looking for a non arbitrary division of the color spectrum, it should be based on that, no?
"Basic" colors are more or less just made up, though. We are constantly just making words and ideas up as we go along. Is purple a "basic" color? Orange? Green? Why would they be a basic color, and not turquoise?
Quote from: Nigel on March 24, 2012, 03:36:24 PM
Quote from: Iptuous on March 20, 2012, 08:04:40 PM
oh.
well, i was saying that if you ask people the basic colors of the rainbow they will give you ROYGBIV, generally. then i pointed that O and I were added arbitrarily to get the magic number 7. i was saying that I seemed contrived to me, but O seemed a natural 'basic' color, but then found that there wasn't even a specific word for it until the fruit was introduced to europe.
this was only tangentially related to what Rat posted, though, i guess...
but as for the russian delineation between light and dark blue, that seemed extra odd to me, since it is a distinction between shade rather than hue, and i was wondering why they had this for one color, but not, presumably, for others.
turquoise is a blue/green color, but would generally not be considered a 'basic' color. we certainly have color names for quite a few hues that don't make it into the acronym.
our cones are centered on Red Blue and Green (with significant overlap, iirc), so i guess if we were looking for a non arbitrary division of the color spectrum, it should be based on that, no?
"Basic" colors are more or less just made up, though. We are constantly just making words and ideas up as we go along. Is purple a "basic" color? Orange? Green? Why would they be a basic color, and not turquoise?
Well I'll tell you something - that pink you posted upthread doesn't
deserve to be a basic colour because it should be banned under the Geneva conventions, and tbh so should that red. They make my eyes uncomfortable and they won't stay still on the screen. Which makes me intrigued about your yellow issue. How does it impact you as someone whose visual perception is key to their craft?
PS I would love an answer but I can probably wait til you aren't feeling so shitty
Quote from: MMIX on March 24, 2012, 05:02:51 PM
Well I'll tell you something - that pink you posted upthread doesn't deserve to be a basic colour because it should be banned under the Geneva conventions, and tbh so should that red. They make my eyes uncomfortable and they won't stay still on the screen.
How did you survive the 80's? I remember sweaters with those colors along with purple and orange. :lol:
But I agree with Nigel about the word thing. People say the French have X-amount of words for different nuances of "love" and the Native Americans don't have swear words...doesn't mean the French are more loving or the Native Americans never get pissed.
Quote from: Anna Mae Bollocks on March 24, 2012, 05:16:49 PM
Quote from: MMIX on March 24, 2012, 05:02:51 PM
Well I'll tell you something - that pink you posted upthread doesn't deserve to be a basic colour because it should be banned under the Geneva conventions, and tbh so should that red. They make my eyes uncomfortable and they won't stay still on the screen.
How did you survive the 80's? I remember sweaters with those colors along with purple and orange. :lol:
Dark glasses
Quote from: Nigel on March 24, 2012, 03:32:24 PM
Quote from: Bebek Sincap Ratatosk on March 20, 2012, 01:35:19 PM
Here's another gret article on perception in language, this time on the topic of colors (Colors being metaphors for light reflecting at specific frequencies):
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/05/language-influences-color-perception.ars (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/05/language-influences-color-perception.ars)
Because the Russian language makes a distinction between light blue and dark blue (as two completely different colors, rather than shades of the same color), test show that they perceive colors in a different way than English speakers.
See? This is a misunderstanding/misinterpretation of the tests. "Perceive" is the wrong word. "Think about" and "describe" would be more accurate. When you say "perceive" you are talking about physical inputs, when actually what varies is the processing and output.
Your right, I should have said that the study indicates that linguistics affect
perceptual decisions. That is the perceptual processing of light blue/dark blue appears to be slower among the English speakers when compared to the perceptual processing of the Russian speakers.
Quote
There are far more factors at play than merely being an English speaker or a Russian speaker, as well. I am part of a community of glass artists all over the world, and we all use the same language to talk about colors... glass language, which is primarily a mixture of English, German, and Italian. This color conversation can be confusing to pigment colorists and light colorists, and even to chemists, because glass combines all three.
Most of these people learned this vocabulary and new cognition of color as adults, regardless of their language of origin. But it didn't change how we perceive the colors (raw input)... it changed how we think about and describe them.
I don't think anyone is disagreeing here. The raw input is light bouncing off of something and being mechanically processed by the optics and brain... its the perception/interpretation part that appears to be affected by linguistics. The study also doesn't say that someone doesn't see the color, but rather because the Russian speaker MUST differentiate in normal language, their perceptual decisions are faster that the English speaker that can call the whole range "blue".
I also agree that any process where someone trains their perceptions to a specific system (like your example with artists and colors), would also have faster perceptual processing... that's the core of the Law of Fives and RAW's Quarter Experiment. Its all about training the perception/processing part of the brain.
Quote from: Anna Mae Bollocks on March 24, 2012, 05:20:18 PM
But I agree with Nigel about the word thing. People say the French have X-amount of words for different nuances of "love" and the Native Americans don't have swear words...doesn't mean the French are more loving or the Native Americans never get pissed.
Yeah but French has different syntactical structure and a proportionally different vocabulary [or so I've heard] and Native Americans [all the different linguistic groups of them] have probably been provoked into pissedoffness more than most peoples.
Quote from: MMIX on March 24, 2012, 05:02:51 PM
Quote from: Nigel on March 24, 2012, 03:36:24 PM
Quote from: Iptuous on March 20, 2012, 08:04:40 PM
oh.
well, i was saying that if you ask people the basic colors of the rainbow they will give you ROYGBIV, generally. then i pointed that O and I were added arbitrarily to get the magic number 7. i was saying that I seemed contrived to me, but O seemed a natural 'basic' color, but then found that there wasn't even a specific word for it until the fruit was introduced to europe.
this was only tangentially related to what Rat posted, though, i guess...
but as for the russian delineation between light and dark blue, that seemed extra odd to me, since it is a distinction between shade rather than hue, and i was wondering why they had this for one color, but not, presumably, for others.
turquoise is a blue/green color, but would generally not be considered a 'basic' color. we certainly have color names for quite a few hues that don't make it into the acronym.
our cones are centered on Red Blue and Green (with significant overlap, iirc), so i guess if we were looking for a non arbitrary division of the color spectrum, it should be based on that, no?
"Basic" colors are more or less just made up, though. We are constantly just making words and ideas up as we go along. Is purple a "basic" color? Orange? Green? Why would they be a basic color, and not turquoise?
Well I'll tell you something - that pink you posted upthread doesn't deserve to be a basic colour because it should be banned under the Geneva conventions, and tbh so should that red. They make my eyes uncomfortable and they won't stay still on the screen. Which makes me intrigued about your yellow issue. How does it impact you as someone whose visual perception is key to their craft?
PS I would love an answer but I can probably wait til you aren't feeling so shitty
Hahaha, luckily my office is right next to the bathroom and I'm not going anywhere far from it for a while.
My aesthetic is clearly a little different, but it doesn't seem to be a detriment at all... I get lots of compliments on my "unusual" color combinations. :lol:
Luckily my issue is that I see extra yellow rather than less yellow, which means that in some instances where I see orange, other people see red; where I see brown, other people see purple, and I see some borderline blue-greens as more green than blue. It's not very extreme, but it's enough that it's created a few disagreements.
It occasionally makes me wonder about certain colors, because my favorite colors are brown, orange, and aqua.
Also, one of the most shocking moments of my life was when I was trying to match the color of the sky and I discovered that it's lavender. I've always assumed that it's kind of greenish-blue, but it's not. At all. It's a purplish-blue.
That's interesting, Nigel, because I once knew someone who remarked that my dull green carpet was brown and my pink house was tan. I thought they might be color blind but they didn't exhibit the usual signs of colorblindness like wearing mismatched clothes, they had excellent color sense. I was stumped for a long time, but extra yellow receptors would explain that.
Quote from: Anna Mae Bollocks on March 24, 2012, 06:10:30 PM
That's interesting, Nigel, because I once knew someone who remarked that my dull green carpet was brown and my pink house was tan. I thought they might be color blind but they didn't exhibit the usual signs of colorblindness like wearing mismatched clothes, they had excellent color sense. I was stumped for a long time, but extra yellow receptors would explain that.
That actually does sound like red/green colorblindness. It's not always absolute... it comes in varying degrees.
Quote from: Nigel on March 24, 2012, 06:23:35 PM
Quote from: Anna Mae Bollocks on March 24, 2012, 06:10:30 PM
That's interesting, Nigel, because I once knew someone who remarked that my dull green carpet was brown and my pink house was tan. I thought they might be color blind but they didn't exhibit the usual signs of colorblindness like wearing mismatched clothes, they had excellent color sense. I was stumped for a long time, but extra yellow receptors would explain that.
That actually does sound like red/green colorblindness. It's not always absolute... it comes in varying degrees.
That would make sense, too. Thanks.
There are basic colors - the colors corresponding to the three wavelengths that the human eye's cone cells have maximal responses to. 565-580 nm red, 535-545 nm green, and 420-440 nm blue.
Quote from: Golden Applesauce on March 24, 2012, 08:12:51 PM
There are basic colors - the colors corresponding to the three wavelengths that the human eye's cone cells have maximal responses to. 565-580 nm red, 535-545 nm green, and 420-440 nm blue.
From one perspective, sure. And from another, there are magenta, yellow, and cyan.
Quote from: Bebek Sincap Ratatosk on March 24, 2012, 05:36:46 PM
Quote from: Nigel on March 24, 2012, 03:32:24 PM
Quote from: Bebek Sincap Ratatosk on March 20, 2012, 01:35:19 PM
Here's another gret article on perception in language, this time on the topic of colors (Colors being metaphors for light reflecting at specific frequencies):
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/05/language-influences-color-perception.ars (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/05/language-influences-color-perception.ars)
Because the Russian language makes a distinction between light blue and dark blue (as two completely different colors, rather than shades of the same color), test show that they perceive colors in a different way than English speakers.
See? This is a misunderstanding/misinterpretation of the tests. "Perceive" is the wrong word. "Think about" and "describe" would be more accurate. When you say "perceive" you are talking about physical inputs, when actually what varies is the processing and output.
Your right, I should have said that the study indicates that linguistics affect perceptual decisions. That is the perceptual processing of light blue/dark blue appears to be slower among the English speakers when compared to the perceptual processing of the Russian speakers.
Quote
There are far more factors at play than merely being an English speaker or a Russian speaker, as well. I am part of a community of glass artists all over the world, and we all use the same language to talk about colors... glass language, which is primarily a mixture of English, German, and Italian. This color conversation can be confusing to pigment colorists and light colorists, and even to chemists, because glass combines all three.
Most of these people learned this vocabulary and new cognition of color as adults, regardless of their language of origin. But it didn't change how we perceive the colors (raw input)... it changed how we think about and describe them.
I don't think anyone is disagreeing here. The raw input is light bouncing off of something and being mechanically processed by the optics and brain... its the perception/interpretation part that appears to be affected by linguistics. The study also doesn't say that someone doesn't see the color, but rather because the Russian speaker MUST differentiate in normal language, their perceptual decisions are faster that the English speaker that can call the whole range "blue".
I also agree that any process where someone trains their perceptions to a specific system (like your example with artists and colors), would also have faster perceptual processing... that's the core of the Law of Fives and RAW's Quarter Experiment. Its all about training the perception/processing part of the brain.
So why do people keep citing these studies as if they tell us something remarkable and unprecedented, when in fact what they are doing is providing scientific backing for old philosophies about language, processing, and description?
Also, again, I would argue that it's got nothing to do with "perceptual" processing. What it has to do with is
answering an unasked question. In Russian, the question is inherent in the way the colors are divided from early childhood. In English, the question is not.
Suppose I ask you to read this block of text:
QuoteYes, when one grows up in the Pueblo community, in the Pueblo tribe the people are communal people, it is an egalitarian communal society. The education of the children is done within the community, this is in the old times before the coming of the Europeans. Each adult works with every child, children belong to everybody and the way of teaching is to tell stories. All information, scientific, technological, historical, religious, is put into narrative form. It is easier to remember that way. So when I began writing when I was at the University of New Mexico, the professor would say now you write your poetry or write a story, write what you know they always tell us. All I knew was my growing up at Laguna, recallings of some other stories that I had been told as a child.
...and pull a specific piece of information from it. However, I haven't told you
what that piece of information is. How fast do you think you're going to come up with what I want?
Basically, my beef is with people using the color/name studies to draw false analogies.
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
QuoteMagenta 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"):
(http://www.biotele.com/magenta_files/extraspectral.jpg)
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 (http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color3.html#colorimetry);
(2) the proportional responses to the stimulus by the
L,
M and
S cones, represented as a chromaticity diagram (http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color1.html#triprinciples); and
(3) the subjective description of the color sensation in terms of
lightness,
hue and hue
purity, the three colormaking attributes (http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color3.html#colormaking).
These methods [of definition] focus on the
physical stimulus,
receptor outputs or
color sensation, respectively.
OMG, that is so fucking cool! Thanks for posting it!
Beyond cool. And the first link clicks over to all kinds of stuff, I got lost in it for awhile. 8)
Quote from: Bebek Sincap Ratatosk on March 24, 2012, 08:28:48 AM
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 (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 (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:
QuoteWe 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 (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.
Quote. 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).
++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?
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.
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?)
I am utterly lost as to what the fuck is actually being discussed here.
You People make NO SENSE.