Dennis Hollingsworth

Colourful Thoughts

The Economist talks about colour:

In the more recent of the two, which appeared this week, Terry Regier, of the University of Chicago, and his colleagues, picked at the question of preconditioned language categories. They used a grid displaying all possible hues rolled into a globe, with black at the north pole and white at the south. In this model, colours stick out from the sphere according to how sensitive the visual system is to them. Bright yellow, for instance, is easily noticed against a background of other colours, so the yellow part of the sphere bulges. Overall, the knobbly globe has exaggerated, smooth mountains with valleys in between.

If humans really are hardwired to home in on six focal colours, then all languages should assign words around those six. Dr Regier, however, tests a subtler concept. He thinks that useful languages should allot words in order to minimise the perceptual difference between colours of the same category, and maximise it between colours in different categories. Unlike national boundaries, linguistic boundaries should form only in the valleys of his colour globe, never over the hills.

Dr Regier therefore programmed his computer to find the best valley borders according to whether he told it to create three, four, five or six ?countries? on the globe. Then, to judge whether people build languages around what their brains are best attuned to, he compared these theoretically best divisions with real-world dividing lines.