http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/190&fsrc=nwl
Arguments for and against, incoming...This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think.
Arguments for and against, incoming...This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think.
Hmm, tha iad ag ràdh an cànan a tha sinn a' bruidhinn seach a' chiad chànan againn...Níall Beag wrote:I don't know what it would feel like to be a native speaker of French, Swahili or even Klingon.
Rilli?Thrissel wrote:Hmm, tha iad ag ràdh an cànan a tha sinn a' bruidhinn seach a' chiad chànan againn...Níall Beag wrote:I don't know what it would feel like to be a native speaker of French, Swahili or even Klingon.
Sin an cànan a bhios sinn a' bruidhinn, nach e...?This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think.
Yeah right...the house believes
No, they just split the colour spectrum amongst different lines. On the bright side, I've run the standard colour swatch test past native speakers and the "modern Gaels" split the spectrum excatly like English speakers do. With the exception of the geal/bàn, dearg/ruadh split of course which is based on material.stumped by the colour system (were ancient Gaels colourblind?!?!?)
But what I was trying to get at is that this is a matter of language shaping our perception. It's a bit of a leap to generalise from language affecting perception to language affecting all cognition.akerbeltz wrote:1) Colour tests. Languages with extremely small color term sets perform less well in colour memorisation tests than speakers of other languages; i.e. if your language only has two terms for dark colour/light colour, then if you're asked to memorise and match different colours, you do less well.
Interesting. How do they measure it objectively?2) Focus. Depending on what grammatical aspects of a statement your native languages places focus on, it affects how easily remember aspects of an event. Agent-Patient languages, if I remember rightly, funnily enough have the tendency to apportion blame more strongly if I remember rightly. Well, a tendency to ... we're not talking about massive differences.
There's a lot of things I wouldn't call "brown" under brown and a lot of things I wouldn't call "orange" under orange. (I certainly don't think of brown as a shade of orange!)
Dè mu dheidhinn "bluegrass"? Agus tha mòran a' fuireach anns na h-Appalachians aig a bheil sinnsearan Albannach...Thrissel wrote:A short note on the colour system: When I saw for the first time some of the 'pedia templates named "Shades of ..." I felt similarly to how I felt when reading in my TYG that 'gorm means blue but also the colour of grass', because no way would you call some of the colours included...
I suppose perception has some influence on cognition and the way I read the language we speak shapes how we think it's about having some (possibly small) amount of influence, not about an overall effect on somebody's thinking. But perhaps it's just my understanding of the word 'shape' having been shaped by the Czech tr*nsl*t**n of the word...Níall Beag wrote:It's a bit of a leap to generalise from language affecting perception to language affecting all cognition.
The way I know WP to work each of the colours appears in the template because somebody wrote in the particular colour's article [[Category:Shades of brown]] - in other words, the colour was seen as a shade of brown by the particular editor.Níall Beag wrote:I think they've started from a purely technical definition of colour boundaries in making that list.
Leis an fhìrinn innse, cha robh mi eòlach cairteal na h-uarach air ais air 'bluegrass' mar rud sam bi eile seach seòrsa ciùil...Seonaidh wrote:Dè mu dheidhinn "bluegrass"? Agus tha mòran a' fuireach anns na h-Appalachians aig a bheil sinnsearan Albannach...
Of course a screen colour (based on an additive colour model), a printed colour made with a single pigment and a printed colour based on a subtractive model don't look identical. Of course, under the right light conditions you can change any colour to something quite different. I'm just trying to say that our naming of colours is purely arbitrary, based on tradition - precisely because neither the pigments in the local grass (technically, grass even isn't a single species) nor the usual local lights (if I remember correctly, our perception of a colour changes even under natural light depending on the angle of incidence, which is why colours change in the evening) are the same everywhere. And btw, there's another influence - the surroundings of the colour. A good optical illusion can be found here.akerbeltz wrote:Regarding colours, the first piece of advice the colour linguistic that tutored me gave me was to stay clear of screen colours and artificial light. The standard test is made either with paper or thread samples under natural light. It's easy to see why when you place two screens side by side and look at the same RGB colour
Bluegrass, under the right light conditions does have shades of grey/sky blue. Anyway...