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Perception, Colour & Language

05_Zebra_A3.jpg
There was quite a fashion for horses being attacked by lion paintings in the late 18thC.

I've always like his zebra.
 
An interesting medical paper here about the way we need to learn how to interpret our visual stimuli. Sidney Bradford became blind as the age of 10 months, but he regained his sight after an operation at age 52. He was unable to recognise facial expressions, was immune to most well-known optical illusions (mostly because perspective and depth was foreign to him) but he could recognise capital letters because he had been taught their shapes using woodblocks as a child.

http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/recovery_blind/recovery-from-early-blindness.pdf

Curiously he seemed to remember red, white and black, but had to be taught all the other colours - he found yellow particularly confusing, as it comes in so many shades. He liked greens and blues, according to that link.
 
oldrover said:
Horses' heads are horribly hard things to depict. They're so familiar to us that we think we know exactly what they look like. So we switch of our observation to an extent and revert back to our preconceptions. Leading to manner of cock ups.
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There must be more too it than that, though? Surely e.g. human heads are even more familiar, and yet there are any number of striking likenesses down the centuries .
 
I think he meant people are to cocky about it. A lot of people also seem to have problems drawing an accurate bicycle.
 
Could any subject possibly be more challenging than a horse riding a bicycle?
 
Krepostnoi said:
There must be more too it than that, though? Surely e.g. human heads are even more familiar, and yet there are any number of striking likenesses down the centuries .
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Fair point. But, horses are difficult things to observe accurately in my experience. But then most animals are. Add to that an existing idea of what they look like, and you get into trouble.

What leads me to think that it's a preconception thing is that there's a common mistake frequently made, in both painting and sculpture. I'd find it difficult to describe But basically there seems to be a tendency to add a feature (for want of a better word) between the eyes. A sort of a cap. Which just isn't there.
 
I've just read possibly the most interesting thread I've ever found on Reddit.
I'll give you two chunks to consider and you can follow the link to the rest:

1) Today I learnt that the colour orange was named after the fruit. Before that, the color was typically referred to as "yellow-red", leading to many orange things being described as "red", such as red hair, red deer, and robin redbreast.

2) My Mom had some old oil paints that said "yellow-red" on them instead of orange. "Red" also used to describe the color later named "brown", which is why there are some animal names that say "red" but are actually brown (e.g. red wolf).

Another interesting thing is that "orange" is usually one of the last colors to get its own name in every language. There are a set of rigid rules that define the order that colours gain names and they almost always follow the same order: the first colour terms in every language, and which every language has, are words for "light" and "dark". "Light" includes all the warm colors (white, yellow, red) and "dark" refers to black, blue, or green. If a language has three color terms (pretty rare these days), the third color term is a word that covers everything from red to yellow, including orange and brown. If a language has four color terms, there are three ways it can be divided - some have white, yellow, red, "dark/cool", some have white, yellow/red, blue/green, black, and some have white, red, yellow/green/blue, and black (the last is the least common split). After that, there are only two variations for languages with 5 color terms - white, yellow, red, blue/green, and black, or white, red, yellow, green, and blue/black. Languages with six colors always have white, red, yellow, blue, green, and black.

Colors that get added on after these first six are usually recent enough in history that you can tell the item the color was named after. English is a little different from most languages because we added "gray" before brown. "Brown" originally meant "bear colored". "Purple" was the name of a dye, and "pink" is a kind of flower (interestingly, the meaning of "pink" in "pinking shears" comes from the same flower - they were pink colored, and the edge of the petals have a pinked pattern, and pink the shape was in our language before pink the color). Orange was the last color term to become a regular part of our language. The next one will be "azure", this is considered as different from blue as green or purple in Russian, Hebrew, and Italian, but in English we still think of "azure" as a shade of blue so it's not a true color term yet.

Japanese is one of those languages with few color terms. Until relatively recently (post WWII), "midori" was considered a shade of "ao", which included blue and green. Before "pinku" was added to the language, things that color were either red or "peach-colored". The closest equivalent to "gray" are words that mean either "ash-colored" or "mouse-colored". The word for "brown" is literally "tea-colored", and they made up the word "orenji" to describe "orange", borrowing the word like they did with "pinku".

Much more here (laced with occasional stupidity):
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/56xxjh
 
I searched but neither could I. If it was in chat, it could have been auto-purged, but I can't imagine that that would have been its natural home.
 
Remember that blue could, I think, be blue-black. Can't help with bronze skies although it sounds suitably epic.
 
rynner2 said:
Just to confuse things still more, there is the Homeric description of the 'Wine dark sea'!
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Bubbles? (hic!)

In fact, hic haec hoc.

@Yithian
I'm very much disagreeing (but not entirely) with the etymology of "orange" the colour coming to us via the fruit.

The word "Or" is in itself yet-another heraldic tincture, meaning gold, golden. There are other franca roots, Or, Aur (from which we get the word 'aura', meaning golden halo). Also the alchemical aurum, Au, on the periodic table (it's elemental, my dear Watson).

This is just about one paragraph from us going into a whole pile of not-entirely baseless conjecture around Mary Magdelaine and suchlike subjective silliness....shall we?
 
Weren't Greek public buildings originally painted in bright pastel colours?
 
Didn't dinosaurs have feathers and wear make up?
 
Yithian said:
Didn't dinosaurs have feathers and wear make up?
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Not through all of the Mesozoic. Some dinosaurs may have had body image issues during the early Triassic. And who knows, there may have been some limited use of moisturisers and facepacks during the late Cretaceous

But my gut feeling is that there was no place for false eyelashes and lippy during most of the Jurassic (unless you were a B-movie time-traveller, in which case butterflies are going to be more of a problem)

Krepostnoi said:
Oh, yes, let's.
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Later. All being well (as opposed to hell)
 
Back to the wine - Red wine isn't red and white wine isn't white!

Can't we have purply wine and clear wine?
 
Ermintrude said:
Bubbles? (hic!)

In fact, hic haec hoc.

@Yithian
I'm very much disagreeing (but not entirely) with the etymology of "orange" the colour coming to us via the fruit.

The word "Or" is in itself yet-another heraldic tincture, meaning gold, golden. There are other franca roots, Or, Aur (from which we get the word 'aura', meaning golden halo). Also the alchemical aurum, Au, on the periodic table (it's elemental, my dear Watson).
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Without checking, I don't think that the word "orange" has anything to do with "or" or "aura". I seem to recall that it comes from the Spanish naranja (ie the fruit), and that the English word was originally "a norange", which became "an orange" over time. So I must respectfully disagree with your disagreement.

So, in summary, I do believe (again, as I say, without bothering to check!) that the colour was named after the fruit, in the same way the Brazil, the country, was named after the nut, and not the other way around.

(Slightly edited for spelling)
 
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Yithian said:
Remember that blue could, I think, be blue-black. Can't help with bronze skies although it sounds suitably epic.
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David Gedge has a blue jaw but he doesn't have blue hair.
 
Just come across what must be the most specific colour description I have ever come across in Moby Dick when the harpooneer takes something out of his bag that is "exactly the colour of a 3-days' old Congo baby". Not two days. Not four days mind. I am still a bit baffled but I think I get the general idea.
 
Oddly enough I've been thinking about Moby Dick this morning, wondering whether to mention it in a reply to another thread...
 
Coal said:
I think Pirsig went over that in ZATAOMCM, but it's a fair point. I vaguely recall an African tribe who don't have words for some of the colours we take for granted and it appeared to change their perception of colour. In the end what the we see is interpreted by the brain, so if you spend your formative years being told "orange is red" you might well see (what we call) orange as red and an orange on a red tablecloth might be hard for you to resolve.
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Neither did English till the late 1500's (at the earliest); anything that today we'd consider "orange" was lumped on the red spectrum, as we did have words for "red". This explains why we call foxes red; why the chest plumage of a robin is "red"; why people with hair which is too light to be brown and too dark to be blonde are called "red haired", when in all three cases, the colour ranges involved would not be termed "red" in the strict modern association of the word "red". More a russety browny-orange hue with red overtones.

the word "orange" arrived with the fruit - of unquestionably orange colour. As English didn't have a word for them, their not being native to northern Europe, the Spanish word naranja was adopted. English mouths had problems with the Spanish pronunciation. And English grammar gave a single naranja the indefinite article "a". A naranja mutated into an aranja. And that pesky "j" softened into something like an aranga. And then "an orange" - for both the fruit and by extension anything of that bright distinctive colour that was nether red nor yellow-gold but something in between.

An interesting related mutation involved the colours of the Dutch flag which was - still is - red-white-blue. At around this time the Dutch discovered oranges as a new fruit and had no native word for it either. And they noted that the national colours, especially after some months at sea or continual exposure to the elements on a flag, saw the dye of the red band fade to.... guess what colour. Hence their pesky ofshoot in the South African colony dispensed with the red and their national flag became orange, white and blue from the start. And at home, the ruling house adopted the new colour and became - The House of Orange. (exporting this, indirectly, to Ireland where it also caused trouble, but different story).

It's an interesting linguistic and psychological point. Does adding a new colour term, opening up a new range of hues which people had hitherto lumped in with a different colour, open up new possibilities, expands the frontier of art and design? If the fruit had not come to Britain, would Sir Isaac Newton only have seen six colours in the prismatic spectrum and gone straight from red to yellow? Richard York Gave Battle In Vain? Would the more militant Northern Irish groups march in "Red" sashes and be called the "Red"men?
 
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