Zompist Bboard Again

All this talk of "are our eyes tuned to the sun's peak" ignores the point of zompist's original post: that our eyes are organs of perception, and have specific biological mechanisms for measuring light. We perceive yellow as inherently bright, and that's that, regardless of how it relates to astronomy. This is easy to test. Go into your favorite image editor and make a little color wheel with the paintbrush tool. Space the hues out equally, so you're making a wheel that accurately spaces out the wavelengths. You will see weird peaks around yellow and cyan, and maybe magenta, where even at constant brightness and saturation, certain colors just "look" brighter. This doesn't line up with the frequencies of our cone cells (in fact cyan and yellow are both between the values detected by two cone cells), so it's probably something to do with how the brain processes the information. But it's undeniably there.

The Germanic languages are well known for having words that can confidently be assigned to grey and brown from an early date. But having words for dark or low-saturation colors is hardly rare. Cross-linguistically, there seems to be a trend to treat "grey-blue-green" or "dark cyan" as its own color. Glaucous fits this description, as do reconstructions of the ancient use of the Chinese word qīng. I think XKCD's chart shows that English speakers perceive something distinct in this region, but struggle to describe it. Just as our perception of brightness is uneven across the spectrum, there may be wedges of the color wheel where grayish or darkish colors just "look" more distinct to the average person.

It's one thing to say "cultural training is why you think brown is a color, but 'dark grey-purple' isn't, but we shouldn't assume that everything our very specific biological organs do is culturally determined. Some things in language really are responses to how our bodies work. We've already conceded that point by accepting the progression of color terms in natural languages to be more-or-less correct, subject to local variation.

zompist wrote: ↑Thu Feb 26, 2026 5:28 pm(The eye could have done spectral analysis. Our instruments can. And so can our ears, with sound waves. But evolution was happy with these blurry response curves.)

Note that the hair cells in your ears aren't attuned at all to a certain frequency, they're all pretty much the same. It's the position within the cochlea that determines when and how they are agitated. Since the cochlea is a very analogue aparatus, regions of hair cells detect a range of frequencies, and the brain takes the average of that to determine what the frequency is. Which can give you funny results if you have hearing damage (like I do), causing tones at the upper range of what you can hear to sound out of tune, as the "overshoot" isn't there, causing an averaging to a lower frequency.


JAL

most of the time, a word comes into existence when the use of the corresponding object becomes frequent...
in such cases, we prefer to give it a name—driven by a sort of animism—and introduce it to everyone...
out of a kind of apprehension, we place great importance on pronouncing and spelling the word correctly, seeking to maintain an environment that feels stable, familiar, and friendly...

words, in turn, facilitate the creation of objects that are essentially the materialization of words; standardized and subsequently industrialized artifacts multiply the names of things through brand names...

look around the room you are in: you are surrounded by "acquaintances"—objects with names that are redundant and often entirely superfluous, yet precise—far more than by actual human acquaintances...

this is a far cry from the natural practice of simply defining things by how we use them, or carrying simple multi-purpose tools capable of eliciting new functions from objects on the fly—the very kind of approach I am trying to rediscover with Lackslang...

brown things are often dirty and need to be scraped clean before they can be used...