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  • From: "JAMES CHRISTIAN READ" <JCR128 AT student.anglia.ac.uk>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Colors and language
  • Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 14:16:08 +0100

YS:But what he claims with the Piraha is that they do
not have a single word for any color names. Thus, one day
they may say, take the gold-colored bowl, the next day,
take the fire-colored bowl, etc. The choice changes as the
mood changes, and this is not because there are
synonyms in the vocabulary, but because color names are
not in their vocabulary.

JCR: I'm not sure where you are getting this argument
from. But it's not presented in any of the links you
provided. In fact, one of the articles you directly
linked to, namely,
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004399.html
argues that Everette's summary of Piraha colours needs
more work and quotes an admission from Dan himself to
this effect:

DE: Paul is absolutely correct in what he says about Pirahã color terms.
He very kindly provided me with a new set of experimental materials, sitting
on my dining room table at present, and I will be re-running the experiments.
I am not sure where the NYr got the dates on Sheldon's work.

I think that the experience of color is concrete but that the labeling of
it is not, following some work by John Lyons and others. However, if Pirahã
turns out to have color terms, I shall certainly let people know and maybe be
convinced that Paul is correct that this bolsters my case. In any case, Paul
and Brent Berlin discussed all of this with me for hours and have been
extremely helpful in improving my understanding of the issues.

JCR: It is impossible for the Piraha to not understand
colour because it is an intrinsic part of our cognitive
development (the foundation upon which we build
language). We use shape discrimination to categorise
solid objects, both animate and inanimate while we use
colour to discriminate liquid objects (inherently have
no shape to use for discrimination) as emphasised by
the following scenario:

"I can see three glasses. Two hold clear liquids the
other holds a red liquid. One is water, one is water
dyed red and the other is hydrochloric acid and I'm
thirsty."

While one could argue about the differences in their
manner of expression of colour the fact remains that
they can express colour as limitlessly as we can or
any other culture for that matter. The theoretical
lack of a standardised system of colours only goes to
highlight their ancient style hunter gatherer culture
which only really seems to take an interest in matters
which pertain to their day to day survival. One may
also make a similar contrast between my limited range
of colour usage to that of an interior designer who
rambles on about bordeaux hues, magenta contrasts and
such like. To the veteran interior designer I with my
colours of the rainbow vocabulary probably seem like a
colour heathen of the worst extreme.

Anyway, back to the Hebrew. The reason I brought all of
this up is because Isaac really needs to put his theory
within the framework of linguistics and saying that
'indo-european languages have lost their root system'
really isn't enough to get out of doing the necessary
legwork because there are a whole range of living
languages out there that don't belong to the i-e group
that Isaac could use to make comparisons with that do
still have their root system in tact.

I have severe doubts that Isaac will be able to prove
his work linguistically though I wish him the best. The
reason I have such great doubts is because of the
evident meaningless phonetic training stage which
exists in all languages as the range of possible
syllables is taught to the infant for later combination
into meaningful words. In order to prove his theory,
Isaac would need to find a culture where this stage of
phonetic training was accompanied by meaning. As it
stands, all psycholinguistic research I have seen seems
to indicate that the human brain is hard wired to go
through this stage of meaningless phonetic training and
such presents a massive obstacle to Isaac's theory
being taken seriously on any serious linguistic level.

James Christian Read
BSc Computer Science (thesis: concept driven machine translation using the
Aleppo codex)
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew


































































































































































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