I won't comment on this, but this was food for thought for the whole day :
Every thinker paints his world and the things that surround him in fewer colours than really exist, and he is blind to individual colours. This is something more than a mere deficiency.
-- F. Nietzsche, Daybreak (Morgenröthe), # 426
but is orange unless, you're a Finn who call it yellow. The science of colour is pretty firm but I'd say it's orange even then. It's just a cultural oddity which I found interesting. If that's worth a snarky comment, well, maybe you can find a page in that book for you, too
Re:god may be dead
rafael on 2003-07-09T08:52:31
God is orange ? You should really unsubscribe from London.pm before it gets too far.I'm not surprised that the finnish colour categories don't match exactly our modern indo-european ones. There are weirder words in ancient languages (and that was the whole point of Nietzsche) : in ancient greek, the glaukos colour covers blue, dark red and green. In sanskrit, krishna means brown, black, dark blue. In other words colour categories are more linguistical than physical.
Of course, that's the opinion of a colour-blind guy who can't tell the difference between orange and green.
Re:god may be dead
hfb on 2003-07-09T10:15:39
Nietzsche was, as I recall but my memory is fuzzy and I don't have the text handy, speaking on the morality of being human. Noone ever quotes Nietzsche with the intent to compliment someone...at least I've never seen it. Nietzsche isn't that kind of philosopher. The only philosopher I bother with is Mark Twain as he, too, was full of shit but he was at least willing to admit this and poke fun at himself lest he take it all too seriously.
Such is human-nature. The man who drinks beer at home always criticizes the champagne, and finds fault with the Burgundy when he is invited out to dinner.
I am aware of the linguistic side, but even in English, Jarkko will refer to the posti box as yellow. Linguistics is messy, science is a bit more well defined with regard to wavelengths and colours they represent. Thank goodness for Pantone.
Also, with regard to Finnish, it wasn't codified until very recent times by comparison to PIE/IE. They have the words for complex colours, but what is orange and what is yellow is exceedingly subjective as some of the photos are orange to Finns, but the algorithm for such differentiation is not a nuance I have yet come to know or understand.
