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Language and metaphor

Started by Lenin McCarthy, March 17, 2012, 10:28:10 PM

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Mesozoic Mister Nigel

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

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.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

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?
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


MMIX

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
"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently" David Graeber

Anna Mae Bollocks

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:
Scantily-Clad Inspector of Gigantic and Unnecessary Cashews, Texas Division

Anna Mae Bollocks

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.
Scantily-Clad Inspector of Gigantic and Unnecessary Cashews, Texas Division

MMIX

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
"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently" David Graeber

Bebek Sincap Ratatosk

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

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.
- I don't see race. I just see cars going around in a circle.

"Back in my day, crazy meant something. Now everyone is crazy" - Charlie Manson

MMIX

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.
"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently" David Graeber

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

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.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Anna Mae Bollocks

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.
Scantily-Clad Inspector of Gigantic and Unnecessary Cashews, Texas Division

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

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.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Anna Mae Bollocks

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.
Scantily-Clad Inspector of Gigantic and Unnecessary Cashews, Texas Division

Golden Applesauce

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.
Q: How regularly do you hire 8th graders?
A: We have hired a number of FORMER 8th graders.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

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.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

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

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'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."