[lit-ideas] Re: Dalton's Disease
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:21:39 +0900
On 10/16/07, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Andreas:
>
> "There are a few tribes that don't have names for colors. They distinguish
> colors in two groups: bright or dark. Red is dark. Green is dark. To them,
> red and green are the same "color", or better said, they are both dark."
>
> -- Ah, but that Dalton's Disease. I didn't know he had contracted it in
> the Polynesia.
>
>
See Berlin and Kay (1969) 'Basic Color Terms, their Universality and
Evolution'. There's a nice summary at
http://www.putlearningfirst.com/language/research/colour_words.html
This work is frequently cited. One notable example is in George Lakoff
(1990) Women, Fire and Dangerous Things in support of the proposition that
the mind does not think naturally in terms of categories, a.k.a., sets whose
members uniformly share defining properties, but, instead, in terms of
prototypes that represent the central tendencies in distributions of often
disparate attributes.
Cheers,
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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