25Jan/07Off
Grue’s my favorite color too
Grue is my favorite color, but one of the big debates in linguistics concerns color perception. The two major viewpoints are either that colors are defined purely by culture but this viewpoint tends to lead to all sorts of sillyness .The opposing view is that colors are perceived the same everywhere, but we just label them differently.
A new study by in PNAS by Regier et al, argues for a third position, that ”color naming across languages reflects optimal or near-optimal divisions of an irregularly shaped perceptual color space”, and back this up with a cross-linguistic comparison. You can get their abstract here or read some commentary in The Economist (of all places) or at Cognitive Daily