Google buys Sapir-Whorf

[Vinny Burgoo]

Google is currently plugging the Endangered Language Project.

http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/about/

Humanity today is facing a massive extinction: languages are
disappearing at an unprecedented pace. And when that happens, a
unique vision of the world is lost. With every language that
dies we lose an enormous cultural heritage; the understanding of
how humans relate to the world around us; scientific, medical
and botanical knowledge; and most importantly, we lose the
expression of communities' humor, love and life. In short, we
lose the testimony of centuries of life.

Do we really lose all that? In a world that is now one big place and no
last speaker of any language dies monolingual? And Rosaceae are Rosaceae
are Rosaceae?

--
VB

[Joachim Pense]

Monolingual speakers are said to be a more common phenomenon today than
millenniums ago.

Joachim

[Peter T. Daniels]

Eh? What is google buying? Whorf lived until 1944, so they can wait
just two more years for what he wrote to enter the public domain (not
that he ever enunciated what came to be called the "Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis").

But, to address Vinnie Burgoo's question, presumably the reason for
the crosspost, no, of course the last speaker of any language doesn't
die monolingual -- unless you can imagine that she survived for some
number of years without communicating with anyone?

[Whiskers]

Tricky to prove!

But the thoughts you can think, are limited by the words and phrases
you know; there;s a strong feed-back loop between the language used to
describe the world, and the way one can perceive the world.

Not long ago, I watched a TV documentary about experiments into just
this sort of thing; it was found that native speakers of different
languages were actually better able to pick out colours that were
important in their languages, and struggled to distinguish colours for
which they had no description (the most striking example was a remote
tribe who could easily distinguish a particular shade of green that was
cuturally significant to them, but Europeans couldn't tell it apart
from similar shades of green - whereas the remote tribe couldn't
distinguish between greens blues and greys which the Europeans 'saw' as
quite different colours). Similar language and perception or
understanding differences were found with numbers, time, distance,
personal relationships, and so on.

So when a language 'dies', we may not lose all the information 'stored'
in its culture, insofar as it gets recorded and translated, but we do
lose a complete and unique way of understanding the world. And the
descendants or successors of its speakers, lose some of their
connection with their history and place in the world.

So I agree with the premise expressed in the OP.

Den heb tavas a gollas y dyr.

--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~

[Mike L]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2012 20:54:42 +0100, Vinny Burgoo <hlu...@yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:

I speculate that we do often lose a lot of that when a language goes.
A bilingual person may very well live the ancestral culture only in
the ancestral language. It seems to me that this is all the more
likely in the case of a language under threat of extinction, if the
reason is the absorption of a group into a dominant culture - or the
extinction of the people themselves.

--
Mike.

[R H Draney]

Whiskers filted:

>
>Not long ago, I watched a TV documentary about experiments into just
>this sort of thing; it was found that native speakers of different
>languages were actually better able to pick out colours that were
>important in their languages, and struggled to distinguish colours for
>which they had no description (the most striking example was a remote
>tribe who could easily distinguish a particular shade of green that was
>cuturally significant to them, but Europeans couldn't tell it apart
>from similar shades of green - whereas the remote tribe couldn't
>distinguish between greens blues and greys which the Europeans 'saw' as
>quite different colours). Similar language and perception or
>understanding differences were found with numbers, time, distance,
>personal relationships, and so on.

I think we've talked about the program here already:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b71rT9fU-I

....r


--
Me? Sarcastic?
Yeah, right.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 26, 6:11 pm, Whiskers <catwhee...@operamail.com> wrote:

That's Berlin & Kay's study of "basic color terms," first published in
1969. It was alleged to be an investigation of "the Whorf hypothesis."

What they found was that languages have between 2 and 9 "basic color
terms," i.e. color terms that don't refer to natural objects of that
color, and the standard set of a hundred or more color chips are
reliably and consistently classified within whatever set of basic
terms the language uses.

That doesn't mean that people with languages with few color terms
don't distinguish colors! It just means they have color names like
"rose" and "coral" and "violet" and "aqua" and "olive" and "emerald"
and "ruby" and so on.

Art historians have observed that European painters didn't use orange
pigments until after the orange fruit had arrived, indicating that
"orange" is indeed not a basic color term.

[benl...@ihug.co.nz]

How's that again? You mean there were orange pigments available
before, but they didn't use them? Or that when the fruit arrived,
somebody went out and invented an orange pigment so they could paint
it?

In any case, B&K 1969 consider "orange" a BCT (as well as "pink", from
the name of a flower), despite the definition you cite. Did the art
historians prove they were wrong?

[Cheryl]

I'm not sure how much of a culture can be lived or experienced by a
single person, even if they speak the language. Some, certainly, just as
some of the culture may be picked up people from other cultures with
other languages. A lot of a culture is expressed in groups - ways of
child-rearing, organization of society, writing, performing and
listening to songs and stories, sharing religious practices or
mythologies specific to the culture, and so on.

I think by the time a culture is down to its last native speaker of the
associated language, it's pretty well dead, except for whatever bits and
pieced have been adopted by other cultures - if any.

--
Cheryl

[Peter T. Daniels]

If they had wanted to color something orange, they would have found a
way to do it.

Gold was represented with yellow, for instance.

> In any case, B&K 1969 consider "orange" a BCT (as well as "pink", from
> the name of a flower), despite the definition you cite. Did the art

> historians prove they were wrong?-

Do art historians know anything about B&K?

IIRC there was controversy about "orange" from the beginning.

[Adam Funk]

Isn't that the case even compared with a hundred or a few hundred
years ago? I suspect it's also a "first world" problem now: everyone
I've met from Africa or South Asia speaks several languages.


--
It is probable that television drama of high caliber and produced by
first-rate artists will materially raise the level of dramatic taste
of the nation. (David Sarnoff, CEO of RCA, 1939; in Stoll 1995)

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2012-06-27 18:05:12 +0200, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> said:

> On 2012-06-26, Joachim Pense wrote:
>
>> Am 26.06.2012 21:54, schrieb Vinny Burgoo:
>>> Google is currently plugging the Endangered Language Project.
>>>
>>> http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/about/
>>>
>>> Humanity today is facing a massive extinction: languages are
>>> disappearing at an unprecedented pace. And when that happens, a
>>> unique vision of the world is lost. With every language that
>>> dies we lose an enormous cultural heritage; the understanding of
>>> how humans relate to the world around us; scientific, medical
>>> and botanical knowledge; and most importantly, we lose the
>>> expression of communities' humor, love and life. In short, we
>>> lose the testimony of centuries of life.
>>>
>>> Do we really lose all that? In a world that is now one big place and no
>>> last speaker of any language dies monolingual? And Rosaceae are Rosaceae
>>> are Rosaceae?
>>>
>>
>> Monolingual speakers are said to be a more common phenomenon today than
>> millenniums ago.
>
>
> Isn't that the case even compared with a hundred or a few hundred
> years ago? I suspect it's also a "first world" problem now: everyone
> I've met from Africa or South Asia speaks several languages.

Not just Africa and South Asia. Pretty much everyone I've met from
Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, much of Eastern
Europe, and Germany, speaks at least two. I put Germany last not
because it isn't important, but because it illustrates that it's not
just in the smaller countries that people are expected to be able to
communicate in at least one foreign language. In France and, of course,
the UK and US, you can find university professors who are resolutely
monoglot, but in Germany it's not hard to find people who clean rooms
who can speak English.
--
athel

[Cheryl]

On 2012-06-27 1:35 PM, Adam Funk wrote:
> On 2012-06-26, Joachim Pense wrote:
>
>> Am 26.06.2012 21:54, schrieb Vinny Burgoo:
>>> Google is currently plugging the Endangered Language Project.
>>>
>>> http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/about/
>>>
>>> Humanity today is facing a massive extinction: languages are
>>> disappearing at an unprecedented pace. And when that happens, a
>>> unique vision of the world is lost. With every language that
>>> dies we lose an enormous cultural heritage; the understanding of
>>> how humans relate to the world around us; scientific, medical
>>> and botanical knowledge; and most importantly, we lose the
>>> expression of communities' humor, love and life. In short, we
>>> lose the testimony of centuries of life.
>>>
>>> Do we really lose all that? In a world that is now one big place and no
>>> last speaker of any language dies monolingual? And Rosaceae are Rosaceae
>>> are Rosaceae?
>>>
>>
>> Monolingual speakers are said to be a more common phenomenon today than
>> millenniums ago.
>
>
> Isn't that the case even compared with a hundred or a few hundred
> years ago? I suspect it's also a "first world" problem now: everyone
> I've met from Africa or South Asia speaks several languages.
>
>

Surely that would depend on your life. A farmworker living a hundred
years ago would speak one language. A businessman working in a port and
dealing with a lot of foreigners might speak two or three. Only the very
educated minority (or perhaps missionaries) would have a chance to learn
another language, and in many cases, that language would be classical
Latin or Greek.

--
Cheryl

[Donna Richoux]

Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

> But, to address Vinnie Burgoo's question, presumably the reason for
> the crosspost, no, of course the last speaker of any language doesn't
> die monolingual -- unless you can imagine that she survived for some
> number of years without communicating with anyone?

Vinnie's assertion seems odd to me. For one thing, sudden massacres and
outbreaks of disease could wipe out all the remaining speakers of a
language in one blow, monolingual or not. Second. an old person could be
tended by family members who *understood* her speech but did not
fluently speak the language themselves. That's what happens in my
(somewhat limited) experience -- the younger generation can understand
the elders but never fully master the language.

I don't care what the circumstances are, it's unlikely that any older
person is suddenly going to become bilingual.

Now as it forgetting important botanical knowledge, etc, that can happen
without any loss of language being involved. From our point of view, it
happened when we dismissed a lot of superstition and folklore about
plants, birds, and so on. Somewhere in that mass of superstition we
probably threw out some gems.

--
Best -- Donna Richoux

[Peter Duncanson [BrE]]

On Wed, 27 Jun 2012 19:18:16 +0200, tr...@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux)
wrote:

Quite possibly.

It can be very difficult (verging on impossible) to recognise
straightforward facts in a mass of superstition and folklore.

Fortunately, as long as those plants and birds still exist there is
still the possibility of learning about them.


--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)

[Whiskers]

That is certainly the same experiment as the one I remember. It was
part of a full-length programme.

[Helmut Richter]

On Wed, 27 Jun 2012, Whiskers wrote:

> Date: 27 Jun 2012 19:00:53 GMT
> From: Whiskers <catwh...@operamail.com>
> Reply-To: Whiskers <catwh...@gmx.co.uk>
> Newsgroups: alt.usage.english, sci.lang
> Subject: Re: Google buys Sapir-Whorf

An interesting point in this "Himba tribe" experiment is that it does *not*
depend on basic or other colour terms. It might well be that with the blueish
and greenish spots discernible by westerners but not by Himba, a westerner
might say "they are all blue (or green, or turquoise) but this one differs in
colour from the others" whereas a Himba would have a hard time seeing any
difference. And the same the other way round with the other sample.

Unfortunately, they did not say *how* the colours were different. Quite the
same perceived colour can have quite different spectra (e.g. turquoise could
have a small spectral area between green and blue, or else a full spectrum
from which some red is missing). I take the physical colour vision, as
distinct from colour perception, to be a universal phenomenon, but that could
be wrong. Now what is the exact difference between the colours some of the
test persons were unable to discern?

Now, when we have two phenomena A and B (in this case colour nomenclature and
colour perception) that are correlated, this can have four different
interpretations:

- A depends on B: colours are named differently when they are perceived
differently.

- B depends on A: colours are perceived differently when they are named
differently.

- common cause: a third phenomenon is responsible for the differences of both
colour nomenclature and colour perception.

- mere coincidence.

The Sapir-Whorf type dependence is the second one, and for me it seems to be
the least plausible. Now, the neurological finding that the region of the
brain where colours are perceived changes with language acquisition is some
indication that there might be some truth to it. Without that, I would have
found the other three much more plausible.

--
Helmut Richter

[Mike L]

On 26 Jun 2012 22:11:10 GMT, Whiskers <catwh...@operamail.com>
wrote:[...]

>
>Den heb tavas a gollas y dyr.

Cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon.

--
Mike.

[Peter T. Daniels]

You seem to be envisioning an English or American countryside, whose
isolation made monolingualism possible. In most of the world (even
continental Europe), everyone would have to be able to get along in at
least two languages and probably more -- their mother tongue, and the
language of the local administration; and quite possibly the language
of their religion.

[R H Draney]

Peter T. Daniels filted:

>
>If they had wanted to color something orange, they would have found a
>way to do it.
>
>Gold was represented with yellow, for instance.

And both can be represented with a stippling of black dots...I've always found
the monochrome representation of colors in heraldry intriguing...were people
learning the practice supposed to make a natural assumption that one pattern of
hachure was red while another was green, or was it understood that the
assignments were arbitrary?...certainly the lightest and darkest, an unmarked
area for argent/white and a dense cross-hatch for sable/black, suggest at least
some attempt at representation....

(ObSomethingOrOther: the only word in the above that Firefox doesn't like the
spelling of is "hachure")....r

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 27, 1:18 pm, t...@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux) wrote:

> Peter T. Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > But, to address Vinnie Burgoo's question, presumably the reason for
> > the crosspost, no, of course the last speaker of any language doesn't
> > die monolingual -- unless you can imagine that she survived for some
> > number of years without communicating with anyone?
>
> Vinnie's assertion seems odd to me. For one thing, sudden massacres and
> outbreaks of disease could wipe out all the remaining speakers of a
> language in one blow, monolingual or not.

Even the most horrible genocides known have never accomplished that.
Armenian, Modern Aramaic, Yiddish, the Tutsi (or is it Hutu?)
language, Serbo-Croatian all continue to be spoken. Taino may have
been the most abrupt language loss we know something of, and they
always say the Tainos were gone "within 50 years."

Language death happens when communities see no point in maintaining
their linguistic distinctiveness. In a famous dissent published in
*Language* an issue or two after a mini-symposium on endangered
languages from the Linguistic Society's annual meeting was published
there, Peter Ladefoged reported on the woman who told him she was
_glad_ her son spoke only Swahili and not her native language, because
her language was a dead end, but with Swahili he could go to Nairobi
and get a good job.

> Second. an old person could be
> tended by family members who *understood* her speech but did not
> fluently speak the language themselves. That's what happens in my
> (somewhat limited) experience -- the younger generation can understand
> the elders but never fully master the language.

There is by now a considerable literature on language death (look up
Nancy Dorian, who studied Scottish Gaelic), and several stages have
been catalogued. What you describe isn't the last stage. At that
point, it's still possible for dedicated enthusiasts to at least
attempt a revival, to prepare pedagogical materials.

> I don't care what the circumstances are, it's unlikely that any older
> person is suddenly going to become bilingual.

Of course not. She had to interact with her neighbors for decades.

> Now as it forgetting important botanical knowledge, etc, that can happen
> without any loss of language being involved. From our point of view, it
> happened when we dismissed a lot of superstition and folklore about
> plants, birds, and so on. Somewhere in that mass of superstition we
> probably threw out some gems.

Loss of culture is orthogonal to loss of language.

[benl...@ihug.co.nz]

That really doesn't seem to discriminate between my two alternatives.
I don't suppose you have a reference to this art-historical finding?

> Gold was represented with yellow, for instance.
>
> > In any case, B&K 1969 consider "orange" a BCT (as well as "pink", from
> > the name of a flower), despite the definition you cite. Did the art
> > historians prove they were wrong?-
>
> Do art historians know anything about B&K?

I'd be surprised if none of them did. But you said above that their
findings proved orange was not a basic colour term. Are you the only
one to have noticed this?

> IIRC there was controversy about "orange" from the beginning.

It's listed there (1969) as basic. What bothered me was that they
could include "orange" and "pink" as basic in English, presumably on
the basis of some facts about English speakers which over-rode the
normal disqualification (as being names of natural things of that
colour), whereas they would have eliminated terms of that type in many
languages for which their data consisted of no more than a dictionary,
in which there was no question of access to any data of the over-
riding type. Of course a lot has happened since 1969....

[Cheryl]

I'm not sure how common that would be. Religious languages would be a
matter of rote for the uneducated, and the local administration wasn't
necessarily from another group - or might be so elevated hat they'd hire
underlings who could translate. Some people travelled remarkable
distances, but others couldn't afford to, didn't want to take the risk,
or - if you go back far enough - couldn't because they were legally tied
to the land.

Even in the 20th century, I discovered that an astonishing number of
Danes, if they were multilingual, certainly didn't include English among
their languages. I eventually realized that when I needed to ask
directions, I'd look around for the most harmless and helpful person I
could find, and quite often I'd pick an elderly lady whose linguistic
skills were less than those of the younger Danes.

In Canada there used to be - probably still are - some immigrant women
who never needed or learned a second language. Their lives were entirely
wih their families. If there were enough of them in an aread, smart
businesses would hire bilingual clerks.


--
Cheryl

[António Marques]

Helmut Richter wrote (27-06-2012 21:59):
> Now, when we have two phenomena A and B (in this case colour nomenclature and
> colour perception) that are correlated, this can have four different
> interpretations:
>
> - A depends on B: colours are named differently when they are perceived
> differently.
>
> - B depends on A: colours are perceived differently when they are named
> differently.
>
> - common cause: a third phenomenon is responsible for the differences of both
> colour nomenclature and colour perception.
>
> - mere coincidence.
>
> The Sapir-Whorf type dependence is the second one, and for me it seems to be
> the least plausible. Now, the neurological finding that the region of the
> brain where colours are perceived changes with language acquisition is some
> indication that there might be some truth to it.

There are some colours for which I have a well-defined value: red, pink (red
1:1 white), orange (red 1:1 yellow), yellow, brown. For others there is a
spectrum: blue, green. Then there's the whole set of mixtures of red and
blue, which I think of by the same name (_roxo_) but can't use it because it
means only dark violet to everyone else. I'd say that for the individual
perception is independent of naming, but any use of that perception has to
take naming into account, being hardly a mystery that the former has to be
processed taking the latter into account.

[benl...@ihug.co.nz]

On Jun 28, 9:15 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Jun 27, 1:18 pm, t...@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux) wrote:
>
> > Peter T. Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > > But, to address Vinnie Burgoo's question, presumably the reason for
> > > the crosspost, no, of course the last speaker of any language doesn't
> > > die monolingual -- unless you can imagine that she survived for some
> > > number of years without communicating with anyone?
>
> > Vinnie's assertion seems odd to me. For one thing, sudden massacres and
> > outbreaks of disease could wipe out all the remaining speakers of a
> > language in one blow, monolingual or not.
>
> Even the most horrible genocides known have never accomplished that.
> Armenian, Modern Aramaic, Yiddish, the Tutsi (or is it Hutu?)
> language, Serbo-Croatian all continue to be spoken. Taino may have
> been the most abrupt language loss we know something of, and they
> always say the Tainos were gone "within 50 years."

Your examples involve languages with millions of speakers. There are
at least as many with speaker numbers in the hundreds or fewer. Here
there is a real possibility that massacre, epidemic or natural
disaster could indeed wipe out the entire population. I'm not saying
it's typical or even common, but it is a real possibility.

[DKleinecke]

Historical Incident. In the early 1900's the Putumayo River region in
(mostly ) southern Columbia underwent the New World equivalent of what
King Leopold did to the Congo (Roger Casemont got his knighthood by
exposing some of it). Whole tribes vanished. We know the history of
one such tribe - the Resigaro - a Resigaro woman found herself, so far
as she knew, the last living speaker of the language. She was an
exceptional person and fought back. She taught her son the language.
Eventually a missionary-linguist found the son and recorded a great
deal about the language. I have no idea whether the son still survives
- but he is surely the last speaker.

That was a near miss on extinction by genocide. There must have others
for which we have no record. Certainly many tribes have disappeared
without a trace.

[Peter Moylan]

Most people don't even know that two colours can have completely
different spectra but be indistinguishable to human eyes. (For
physiological, not cultural, reasons.) Nor do they know that, for that
reason, one species can distinguish two colours that another species
sees as identical. That's probably why the researchers didn't mention it
-- it wouldn't have occurred to them that it might matter.

I think it's generally known that human eyes have only three kinds of
colour receptors, but most people don't think about the implications of
that. It's entirely plausible that an isolated group could evolve colour
receptors that are "tuned" to different frequency responses than those
of the wider population. Actually, I find it plausible that there would
be individual variations even in an homogenous [1] population, and
almost beyond contest that there are differences between men and women.

Now, I don't mean to deny that cultural differences also play a part.
I'm reasonably convinced that the above-mentioned experiments are indeed
picking up cultural differences; and that the differences in colour
words in different languages are also a cultural matter. Nevertheless, I
find it unfortunate that the experimenters in this field don't seem to
be careful to factor out the physiological differences before reaching
conclusions about cultural differences.

[1] By the way, what's the difference between "homogenous" and
"homogeneous"? I think of them as different words with different
pronunciations, but my spelling checker insists that the former is a
misspelling of the latter.

--
Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org
For an e-mail address, see my web page.

[Peter Moylan]

Adam Funk wrote:
> On 2012-06-26, Joachim Pense wrote:
>
>> Am 26.06.2012 21:54, schrieb Vinny Burgoo:
>>> Google is currently plugging the Endangered Language Project.
>>>
>>> http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/about/
>>>
>>> Humanity today is facing a massive extinction: languages are
>>> disappearing at an unprecedented pace. And when that happens, a
>>> unique vision of the world is lost. With every language that
>>> dies we lose an enormous cultural heritage; the understanding of
>>> how humans relate to the world around us; scientific, medical
>>> and botanical knowledge; and most importantly, we lose the
>>> expression of communities' humor, love and life. In short, we
>>> lose the testimony of centuries of life.
>>>
>>> Do we really lose all that? In a world that is now one big place and no
>>> last speaker of any language dies monolingual? And Rosaceae are Rosaceae
>>> are Rosaceae?
>>>
>> Monolingual speakers are said to be a more common phenomenon today than
>> millenniums ago.
>
> Isn't that the case even compared with a hundred or a few hundred
> years ago? I suspect it's also a "first world" problem now: everyone
> I've met from Africa or South Asia speaks several languages.

In any case, it's irrelevant to the point above, because most
monolingual speakers speak a language that is in no danger of dying out.

[Peter Moylan]

>> Even the most horrible genocides known have never accomplished that.
>> Armenian, Modern Aramaic, Yiddish, the Tutsi (or is it Hutu?)
>> language, Serbo-Croatian all continue to be spoken.

Hutu, Tutsi, goodbye
Hutu, Tutsi, don't cry.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 27, 9:59 pm, Peter Moylan <inva...@peter.pmoylan.org.invalid>
wrote:

> Most people don't even know that two colours can have completely
> different spectra but be indistinguishable to human eyes. (For
> physiological, not cultural, reasons.) Nor do they know that, for that
> reason, one species can distinguish two colours that another species
> sees as identical. That's probably why the researchers didn't mention it
> -- it wouldn't have occurred to them that it might matter.
>
> I think it's generally known that human eyes have only three kinds of
> colour receptors, but most people don't think about the implications of
> that. It's entirely plausible that an isolated group could evolve colour

Wouldn't they have to be very isolated for a very long time for the
mutation to spread through an entire population?

> receptors that are "tuned" to different frequency responses than those
> of the wider population. Actually, I find it plausible that there would
> be individual variations even in an homogenous [1] population, and
> almost beyond contest that there are differences between men and women.
>
> Now, I don't mean to deny that cultural differences also play a part.
> I'm reasonably convinced that the above-mentioned experiments are indeed
> picking up cultural differences; and that the differences in colour
> words in different languages are also a cultural matter. Nevertheless, I
> find it unfortunate that the experimenters in this field don't seem to
> be careful to factor out the physiological differences before reaching
> conclusions about cultural differences.
>
> [1] By the way, what's the difference between "homogenous" and
> "homogeneous"? I think of them as different words with different
> pronunciations, but my spelling checker insists that the former is a
> misspelling of the latter.

Anna Russell is one of yours, isn't she? In one of her best-known
routines, she corrects "homogeneous" to "homogenous -- like
milk" (i.e., homogenized). Could it be an Australian-specific variant?

[Peter T. Daniels]

Nope, but I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to find with a bit of
judicious googling.

I don't think it's in David Hockney's book about how everyone from the
Renaissance to the 19th c. used the camera obscura to get perpective
right, but I don't often look at art history books, but that was one
of them.

> > Gold was represented with yellow, for instance.
>
> > > In any case, B&K 1969 consider "orange" a BCT (as well as "pink", from
> > > the name of a flower), despite the definition you cite. Did the art
> > > historians prove they were wrong?-
>
> > Do art historians know anything about B&K?
>
> I'd be surprised if none of them did. But you said above that their
> findings proved orange was not a basic colour term. Are you the only
> one to have noticed this?

Show that, not prove that. Perhaps an anthropologist noted it. Perhaps
it was a food book that mentioned the origins of foodstuffs.

> > IIRC there was controversy about "orange" from the beginning.
>
> It's listed there (1969) as basic.

Check the reviews. What I have (somewhere) is the second edition (the
1st was never paperbacked), and they may well cite the discussion.

> What bothered me was that they
> could include "orange" and "pink" as basic in English, presumably on
> the basis of some facts about English speakers which over-rode the
> normal disqualification (as being names of natural things of that
> colour), whereas they would have eliminated terms of that type in many
> languages for which their data consisted of no more than a dictionary,
> in which there was no question of access to any data of the over-

> riding type. Of course a lot has happened since 1969....-

Maybe, like 1066 And All That, they wanted English to be Top Language.

[Peter T. Daniels]

Even the poorest Jewish boys studied some amount of Hebrew. They might
never have had occasion to read or write Yiddish (though perhaps they
could figure it out if necessary), let alone the language of the
surrounding goyim.

> Even in the 20th century, I discovered that an astonishing number of
> Danes, if they were multilingual, certainly didn't include English among
> their languages. I eventually realized that when I needed to ask
> directions, I'd look around for the most harmless and helpful person I
> could find, and quite often I'd pick an elderly lady whose linguistic
> skills were less than those of the younger Danes.
>
> In Canada there used to be - probably still are - some immigrant women
> who never needed or learned a second language. Their lives were entirely
> wih their families. If there were enough of them in an aread, smart
> businesses would hire bilingual clerks.

A good friend of mine, born to immigrants in Chicago, spoke no English
until he entered school, and his parents had almost no English even 30
years later.

I've also mentioned the perfectly trilingual Chicagoan whose mother
spoke only Nahuatl. I don't know if his father spoke English -- I
don't know if the father was with the family in Chicago, though it
seems unlikely that she would have emigrated alone.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 27, 10:08 pm, Peter Moylan <inva...@peter.pmoylan.org.invalid>
wrote:

> >> Even the most horrible genocides known have never accomplished that.
> >> Armenian, Modern Aramaic, Yiddish, the Tutsi (or is it Hutu?)
> >> language, Serbo-Croatian all continue to be spoken.
>
> Hutu, Tutsi, goodbye
> Hutu, Tutsi, don't cry.

That doesn't actually help ...

(and I have no intention of seeing the movie)

[Robert Bannister]

On 28/06/12 1:18 AM, Donna Richoux wrote:

>
> I don't care what the circumstances are, it's unlikely that any older
> person is suddenly going to become bilingual.

In fact, I believe it sometimes happens that an elderly person suddenly
becomes monolingual and not always in their birth language, though that
is usually the case.


--
Robert Bannister

[Robert Bannister]

There was fairly extensive reporting when the last speaker of Yahgan,
the language of Tierra del Fuego, died not so long ago. She was not
monolingual.

--
Robert Bannister

[Robert Bannister]

I think you are omitting a number of other people involved in foreign
trade. At the port and with land-locked countries, anywhere near the
borders, it will not just be the businessman, but also the tavern keeper
and no doubt his wenches, plus all the people who have dealings with the
ships: pilots, chandlers, shipbuilders. When there is a financial
incentive, people quickly learn. The main exceptions are English speakers.

--
Robert Bannister

[Jerry Friedman]

On Jun 27, 10:52 am, Athel Cornish-Bowden <athel...@yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:

> On 2012-06-27 18:05:12 +0200, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> said:
> > On 2012-06-26, Joachim Pense wrote:

...

> >> Monolingual speakers are said to be a more common phenomenon today than
> >> millenniums ago.
>
> > Isn't that the case even compared with a hundred or a few hundred
> > years ago?  I suspect it's also a "first world" problem now: everyone
> > I've met from Africa or South Asia speaks several languages.
>
> Not just Africa and South Asia. Pretty much everyone I've met from
> Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, much of Eastern
> Europe, and Germany, speaks at least two. I put Germany last not
> because it isn't important, but because it illustrates that it's not
> just in the smaller countries that people are expected to be able to
> communicate in at least one foreign language. In France and, of course,
> the UK and US, you can find university professors who are resolutely
> monoglot, but in Germany it's not hard to find people who clean rooms
> who can speak English.

It's not hard in America either, if you're including English as a
second language.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Adam Funk]

On 2012-06-28, Peter Moylan wrote:

> Most people don't even know that two colours can have completely
> different spectra but be indistinguishable to human eyes. (For
> physiological, not cultural, reasons.) Nor do they know that, for that
> reason, one species can distinguish two colours that another species
> sees as identical. That's probably why the researchers didn't mention it
> -- it wouldn't have occurred to them that it might matter.

I saw an interesting demonstration of this a year or so ago. The
presenter had two white (on the inside) boxes in a dark lecture hall;
one box had a white light, and the other had an adjustable combination
of coloured lights. He twiddled the settings until nearly everyone in
the audience agreed that the second box looked white inside. (Some
people still thought it was close to white, but not exactly white.)
Then he stuck a tomato inside each box; the one in box 1 looked right,
whereas the one in box 2 looked very weird. (He swapped the tomatoes
to prove that they were identical.)

> I think it's generally known that human eyes have only three kinds of
> colour receptors, but most people don't think about the implications of
> that. It's entirely plausible that an isolated group could evolve colour
> receptors that are "tuned" to different frequency responses than those
> of the wider population.

You could test that with RGB monitors.

> Actually, I find it plausible that there would
> be individual variations even in an homogenous [1] population, and
> almost beyond contest that there are differences between men and women.

As I mentioned above, not everyone agreed that the presenter had the
lights "tuned" to white.

> [1] By the way, what's the difference between "homogenous" and
> "homogeneous"? I think of them as different words with different
> pronunciations, but my spelling checker insists that the former is a
> misspelling of the latter.

The OED has "homogeneous" as "Of one thing in respect of another, or
of various things in respect of each other: Of the same kind, nature,
or character; alike, similar, congruous" from 1641, with the note
"Forms: Also erron. -genous".

I was under the impression that "homogenous" was merely a common
misspelling & mispronunciation of "homogeneous" *but* the OED does
have a specialized "homogenous" as "Biol. = homogenetic adj. 1" (only
2 citations in the 1870s) and "Surg. Of transplanted tissue: =
homoplastic adj. 2" (1919, 1939, 1964).


--
Unix is a user-friendly operating system. It's just very choosy about
its friends.

[Adam Funk]

On 2012-06-27, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:

> On 2012-06-27 18:05:12 +0200, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> said:
>
>> On 2012-06-26, Joachim Pense wrote:

>>> Monolingual speakers are said to be a more common phenomenon today than
>>> millenniums ago.
>>
>>
>> Isn't that the case even compared with a hundred or a few hundred
>> years ago? I suspect it's also a "first world" problem now: everyone
>> I've met from Africa or South Asia speaks several languages.
>
> Not just Africa and South Asia. Pretty much everyone I've met from
> Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, much of Eastern
> Europe, and Germany, speaks at least two. I put Germany last not
> because it isn't important, but because it illustrates that it's not
> just in the smaller countries that people are expected to be able to
> communicate in at least one foreign language. In France and, of course,
> the UK and US, you can find university professors who are resolutely
> monoglot, but in Germany it's not hard to find people who clean rooms
> who can speak English.

I think most of your European examples involve people who speak their
native language (or native dialect along with the country's
standardized language) as well as having learnt English in school (so
they probably speak English mainly with foreigners of various kinds).

I didn't make this clear in my previous post, but I was thinking of
people who speak two or more local languages & probably would do so
without formal teaching; I get the impression that's common in Africa
& South Asia.


--
It is probable that television drama of high caliber and produced by
first-rate artists will materially raise the level of dramatic taste
of the nation. (David Sarnoff, CEO of RCA, 1939; in Stoll 1995)

[Cheryl]

I've certainly known of a case in which an elderly person lost her
second language. It was particularly difficult because although her son
spoke her language fairly well, none of the rest of the family and
extremely few of the larger community did, so if he was at work or
asleep, she couldn't communicate with anyone.

I know it's harder for older people to learn new languages, but there
seem to be people who manage it. Wasn't that "Inn of the Sixth
Happiness" missionary originally turned down because she was considered
too old (and too uneducated) to learn Chinese, which she later did quite
successfully. She wasn't elderly, though.

--
Cheryl

[Whiskers]

On 2012-06-27, Helmut Richter <hh...@web.de> wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Jun 2012, Whiskers wrote:

[...]

>> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b71rT9fU-I
>> >
>> > ....r
>>
>> That is certainly the same experiment as the one I remember. It was
>> part of a full-length programme.
>
> An interesting point in this "Himba tribe" experiment is that it does *not*
> depend on basic or other colour terms. It might well be that with the blueish
> and greenish spots discernible by westerners but not by Himba, a westerner
> might say "they are all blue (or green, or turquoise) but this one differs in
> colour from the others" whereas a Himba would have a hard time seeing any
> difference. And the same the other way round with the other sample.
>
> Unfortunately, they did not say *how* the colours were different. Quite the
> same perceived colour can have quite different spectra (e.g. turquoise could
> have a small spectral area between green and blue, or else a full spectrum
> from which some red is missing). I take the physical colour vision, as
> distinct from colour perception, to be a universal phenomenon, but that could
> be wrong. Now what is the exact difference between the colours some of the
> test persons were unable to discern?

I expect the experimental details were greatly simplified for the TV
show description; it wouldn't be too difficult to get precise frequency
patterns ("spectra") for the colour squares displayed.

> Now, when we have two phenomena A and B (in this case colour nomenclature and
> colour perception) that are correlated, this can have four different
> interpretations:
>
> - A depends on B: colours are named differently when they are perceived
> differently.
>
> - B depends on A: colours are perceived differently when they are named
> differently.
>
> - common cause: a third phenomenon is responsible for the differences of both
> colour nomenclature and colour perception.
>
> - mere coincidence.
>
> The Sapir-Whorf type dependence is the second one, and for me it seems to be
> the least plausible. Now, the neurological finding that the region of the
> brain where colours are perceived changes with language acquisition is some
> indication that there might be some truth to it. Without that, I would have
> found the other three much more plausible.

I think it's pretty well established that human eye and brain physical
responses to colour are within close limits, apart from individuals with
damaged or malformed eyes or brains - and the 'colour blind' variations
which were largely unknown until John Dalton investigated his own vision
in the late 18th century. There are simple tests for most forms of
colour blindness - but as language has to mediate the tests, it's
intriguing to wonder if (eg) the Himbra would be able to cope with such
tests designed by (eg) Germans.

[Whiskers]

<waves across the sea>

[Cheryl]

In my limited experience of Africa, this is quite common in smallish
areas with lots of neighbouring areas filled with people of fairly
similar, but not identical, ethnicity. Just about anyone can speak their
own language, and at least get by in a couple closely-related languages
of small nearby groups plus of course whatever the local 'trade
language' was - Hausa was fairly common in parts of West Africa. And if
they were sent to school or lived in an area with tourists, they'd
probably pick up some English or other really foreign language. At least
some of the ones who didn't have formal education in a foreign language
didn't always understand that you might study a language. It appeared
like they just picked it up as they went along, and didn't try to
understand the grammar or memorize lists of words. More like learning a
mother tongue than a second language in the rather old-fashioned methods
used to try to teach me French.

--
Cheryl

[Cheryl]

On 28/06/2012 1:55 AM, Robert Bannister wrote:

>
> I think you are omitting a number of other people involved in foreign
> trade. At the port and with land-locked countries, anywhere near the
> borders, it will not just be the businessman, but also the tavern keeper
> and no doubt his wenches, plus all the people who have dealings with the
> ships: pilots, chandlers, shipbuilders. When there is a financial
> incentive, people quickly learn. The main exceptions are English speakers.
>

Yes, of course, but that would apply mainly in the ports. Before modern
transportation made it comparatively easy for large numbers of
travellers to reach places distant from their port of entry (and
increased the number of ports of entry) a LOT of the population in any
largish area would never need to speak another language. Of course, the
smaller the country/tribal lands, the closer they are to people who
speak another language and the more likely they are to use it.

I think a lot of English speakers never need to use another language for
financial or other reasons, and moreover, never get to practice any
language they do try to learn, unless they're of an age and level of
determination to go to an immersion group somewhere.

--
Cheryl

[Whiskers]

On 2012-06-27, R H Draney <dado...@spamcop.net> wrote:
> Peter T. Daniels filted:
>>
>>If they had wanted to color something orange, they would have found a
>>way to do it.
>>
>>Gold was represented with yellow, for instance.

Unless the real thing or a reasonable imitation was available. That is
still the case.

> And both can be represented with a stippling of black dots...I've always found
> the monochrome representation of colors in heraldry intriguing...were people
> learning the practice supposed to make a natural assumption that one pattern of
> hachure was red while another was green, or was it understood that the
> assignments were arbitrary?...certainly the lightest and darkest, an unmarked
> area for argent/white and a dense cross-hatch for sable/black, suggest at least
> some attempt at representation....
>
> (ObSomethingOrOther: the only word in the above that Firefox doesn't like the
> spelling of is "hachure")....r

The "Petra Sancta" system? That is merely a conventional substitution
of a particular pattern of fine lines or grooves for each of the seven
heraldic colours. I can't imagine any direct connection between any
colour and any particular pattern of grooves.

Book printers also use a rather more subtle system of dots and lines to
stand in for colours and brightness, or these days electronically
convert a colour image into monochrome and then apply a 'half-tone'
filter or something of the sort to suit the final printing process.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 28, 10:27 am, Cheryl <cperk...@mun.ca> wrote:
> On 28/06/2012 1:55 AM, Robert Bannister wrote:
>
>
>
> > I think you are omitting a number of other people involved in foreign
> > trade. At the port and with land-locked countries, anywhere near the
> > borders, it will not just be the businessman, but also the tavern keeper
> > and no doubt his wenches, plus all the people who have dealings with the
> > ships: pilots, chandlers, shipbuilders. When there is a financial
> > incentive, people quickly learn. The main exceptions are English speakers.
>
> Yes, of course, but that would apply mainly in the ports. Before modern
> transportation made it comparatively easy for large numbers of
> travellers to reach places distant from their port of entry (and
> increased the number of ports of entry) a LOT of the population in any
> largish area would never need to speak another language. Of course, the
> smaller the country/tribal lands, the closer they are to people who
> speak another language and the more likely they are to use it.

I think you don't realize how close together villages were in pre-
industrial times; yet they were far enough separated that each one
developed its own mini-dialectal quirks. Hence the notion (in West
Africa) of one-day languages, two-day langugages, etc. -- referring to
how long it took to learn a nearby language.

Plus there were always endogamous societies, so that father and mother
almost necessarily spoke different languages. In Papua New Guinea, the
languages of adjacent villages can be utterly unrelated.

> I think a lot of English speakers never need to use another language for
> financial or other reasons, and moreover, never get to practice any
> language they do try to learn, unless they're of an age and level of
> determination to go to an immersion group somewhere.

And that is the exception.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 28, 10:31 am, Whiskers <catwhee...@operamail.com> wrote:

> On 2012-06-27, R H Draney <dadoc...@spamcop.net> wrote:
> > Peter T. Daniels filted:
>
> >>If they had wanted to color something orange, they would have found a
> >>way to do it.
>
> >>Gold was represented with yellow, for instance.
>
> Unless the real thing or a reasonable imitation was available.  That is
> still the case.

If you could afford to have your artists gild your mss., you of course
did so. It's a case of "If you have to ask, then you can't afford to
buy it."

> > And both can be represented with a stippling of black dots...I've always found
> > the monochrome representation of colors in heraldry intriguing...were people
> > learning the practice supposed to make a natural assumption that one pattern of
> > hachure was red while another was green, or was it understood that the
> > assignments were arbitrary?...certainly the lightest and darkest, an unmarked
> > area for argent/white and a dense cross-hatch for sable/black, suggest at least
> > some attempt at representation....
>
> > (ObSomethingOrOther: the only word in the above that Firefox doesn't like the
> > spelling of is "hachure")....r
>
> The "Petra Sancta" system?  That is merely a conventional substitution
> of a particular pattern of fine lines or grooves for each of the seven
> heraldic colours.  I can't imagine any direct connection between any
> colour and any particular pattern of grooves.

Armorials were quite handsomely painted, in real colors.

Was the monochrome system even invented before printing made some sort
of accommodation necessary?

[James Silverton]

The commonest used color vision test is the Ishihara test
(eg. http://www.archimedes-lab.org/colorblindnesstest.html)
and that, while very reliable, mostly relies on number recognition so I
think primitives might have to be taught some elements of numeracy.
--
Jim Silverton (Potomac, MD)

Extraneous "not" in Reply To.

[Anton Shepelev]

Peter T. Daniels:

> Loss of culture is orthogonal to loss of language.

Those may be not parallel, but I'm sure they are not
orthogonal. Language reflects culture and mentality
and thereby "contains" it. It also does it more
literally by serving as the code for the majority of
written works of a culture. When a man "switches"
to another language, he gradually becomes part of
another culture and is assimilated. His original
culture is lost, or at least highly dissolved. The
learning of another language does not imply "switch-
ing" to it.

--
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail
/\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments

[Peter Duncanson [BrE]]

She certainly wasn't elderly, but she did lack formal education.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Aylward

Early life

Aylward was born of a working-class family in Edmonton, London in
1902. Although she became a domestic worker at an early age, she
always had an ambition to go overseas as a missionary, and studied
with great determination in order to be fitted for the role, only to
be turned down because her academic background was inadequate and
the missionary training school to which she applied was convinced
that it was not possible to learn the language at her age.

Her determination was such that, in 1930, she spent her life savings
on a passage to Yuncheng, Shanxi Province, China.

Gladys Aylward came to speak at the Sunday School I attended in England
(late 1940s/early 1950s).

Wikip says of the movie _The Inn of the Sixth Happiness_

...Aylward was mortified by her depiction in the film and the many
liberties it took. The tall, Swedish Ingrid Bergman was inconsistent
with Aylward's small stature, dark hair and cockney accent.

Having seen Gladys Aylward in person I had a lot of difficulty
connecting her with the person portrayed in the film. That is probably a
good thing as the film is not an accurate portrayal of her life.

--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)

[António Marques]

Anton Shepelev wrote (28-06-2012 16:41):
> Peter T. Daniels:
>
>> Loss of culture is orthogonal to loss of language.
>
> Those may be not parallel, but I'm sure they are not orthogonal. Language
> reflects culture and mentality and thereby "contains" it. It also does
> it more literally by serving as the code for the majority of written
> works of a culture. When a man "switches" to another language, he
> gradually becomes part of another culture and is assimilated. His
> original culture is lost, or at least highly dissolved. The learning of
> another language does not imply "switch- ing" to it.

Language may reflect culture and mentality, but that may mean that people
speaking 'the same' language but coming from different cultures may in fact
be speaking different languages, which just happen to coincide in grammar
and vocabulary. Likewise people who shifted language may have imported their
culture into the target language.

[Christian Weisgerber]

Peter Moylan <inv...@peter.pmoylan.org.invalid> wrote:

> Most people don't even know that two colours can have completely
> different spectra but be indistinguishable to human eyes. (For
> physiological, not cultural, reasons.)

It gets better: Identical spectra can also appear as different
colors. For example, a white sheet of paper under an incandescent
light should appear red--but it's still white, because there is
some compensation for the spectrum of the ambient lighting going
on.

> I think it's generally known that human eyes have only three kinds of
> colour receptors, but most people don't think about the implications of
> that. It's entirely plausible that an isolated group could evolve colour
> receptors that are "tuned" to different frequency responses than those
> of the wider population. Actually, I find it plausible that there would
> be individual variations even in an homogenous [1] population, and
> almost beyond contest that there are differences between men and women.

The 1993 edition of C.L. Hardin, _Color for Philosophers_ mentions
this:

| More recently, a gene polymorphism has been connected to a
| difference in peak absorption spectra of human cone types, and
| this has in turn been directly linked to differences in color
| matching between two groups of Caucasian males [...].
|
| Merbs, S. L., and Nathan, J. 1992. Absorption of spectra of human
| cone pigments. _Nature_ 356, 378-379.
|
| Winderickx, J., Lindsey, D. T., et al. 1992. Polymorphism in red
| photopigment underlies variation in color matching. _Nature_ 356,
| 431-433.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de

[R H Draney]

Whiskers filted:

>
>I think it's pretty well established that human eye and brain physical
>responses to colour are within close limits, apart from individuals with
>damaged or malformed eyes or brains - and the 'colour blind' variations
>which were largely unknown until John Dalton investigated his own vision
>in the late 18th century. There are simple tests for most forms of
>colour blindness - but as language has to mediate the tests, it's
>intriguing to wonder if (eg) the Himbra would be able to cope with such
>tests designed by (eg) Germans.

Or by Russians, who have one word for "blue" and a different word for "light
blue"...or the Japanese, who use the same word for "blue", "green" and
"sallow"...or Homer, who used the same word to describe the color of the sea, of
wine, and of what we'd call a "chestnut" horse....r


--
Me? Sarcastic?
Yeah, right.

[António Marques]

R H Draney wrote (27-06-2012 22:13):
> hachure

Ok... so I'd never heard this word in my life. No, I hadn't. It's
impossible. It comes nowhere near my interests (this first time I read this
I thought it was some fancy word for azure, though it didn't make much
sense), and I don't see how it can venture outside its smallish domain(s).
So, what happened today morning? I got a status update from my cousin*,
who's an architect, using the portuguese version of it (hachura). This is no
coincidence nor confirmation bias. No. This is God playing tricks with our
minds. It's not a thing that was bound to happen at least once and happened
now. No. This happens often; but this time I actually have it documented
(27-06-2012 22:13, 28-06-2012 04:44, my time).

(*) My mother's niece and one of my father's nephews are architects, but I'm
not even sure they ever met each other, and I certainly have never had any
contact either with their lives while students or as professionals.

[R H Draney]

=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gTWFycXVlcw==?= filted:

>
>R H Draney wrote (27-06-2012 22:13):
>> hachure
>
>Ok... so I'd never heard this word in my life. No, I hadn't. It's
>impossible. It comes nowhere near my interests (this first time I read this
>I thought it was some fancy word for azure, though it didn't make much
>sense), and I don't see how it can venture outside its smallish domain(s).

You never heard "hash marks"?...or wondered why the character that leads off
"#justinbieber" or whatever leads to it being called a "hash tag"?...r

[António Marques]

Being familiar with the word 'hash' is not the same as being familiar with
the word 'hachure'.

[benl...@ihug.co.nz]

No more than recognition of certain linear shapes. You could easily
make an Ishihara test with non-numerical figures. Or, more
practically, introduce your 'primitives' to the shapes of the numerals
without any reference to their meaning. They either see them or they
don't.

[Whiskers]

People wanted their 'arms' to be marked on metal table-ware and carved
into wood and stone, and on seals and signet-rings, so a standard way of
representing the colours in 'no colour' materials must have been quite
important. There would also have been a need for wood-cut or hand-drawn
depictions in monochrome; not all those who needed to recognise the
'arms' of their war-leader would have been literate, nor would the
artisans expected to create the more expensive full-colour versions.

[Mark Brader]

Peter Moylan:

> Most people don't even know that two colours can have completely
> different spectra but be indistinguishable to human eyes. (For

> physiological, not cultural, reasons.) Nor do they know that, for that
> reason, one species can distinguish two colours that another species
> sees as identical. That's probably why the researchers didn't mention it
> -- it wouldn't have occurred to them that it might matter.
>

> I think it's generally known that human eyes have only three kinds of
> colour receptors,

Specifically, the cells are the same except that contain different
active pigments.

> but most people don't think about the implications of
> that. It's entirely plausible that an isolated group could evolve colour
> receptors that are "tuned" to different frequency responses than those
> of the wider population.

It's an interesting point.

Note in particular that "only three kinds of receptors" pertains to
people with normal color vision. The pigments for red and green
are very similar*, the one presumably having arisen through a mutation
in the gene for the other. Both genes are on the X chromosome, so
that men (having only one X chromosome) are much more likely to be
color-blind due to lacking one or the other of those pigments.

But it turns out that there is also at least one other mutated form of
the gene, which produces a pigment with intermediate properties.
If you have that instead of one of the normal genes, then you still
have three kind of cones, but the sets of spectra that look equivalent
to you (for the reason Peter explains) aren't the same ones that look
equivalent to other people.

So one could certainly imagine an isolated group where all the people
are like this, or a substantial portion of them are.

It's also possible for a person, at least for a woman, to have the
the intermediate pigment and all three normal pigments...


*As I understand it, the peak response for both is actually in the
yellow, but the raw RGB signals from the eye get processed through
an opponency system that effectively subtracts the original R and G
signals to prioduced the perceived ones.

--
Mark Brader "... we still feel that color is hard
Toronto on the eyes for so long a picture ..."
m...@vex.net -- N.Y. Times review of GONE WITH THE WIND

My text in this article is in the public domain.

[R H Draney]

But "hachure" is the origin of the word "hash" meaning a pattern of
criss-crossing lines....r

[Peter Duncanson [BrE]]

Sort of.
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/hash--3?q=hash+sign

hash3

noun
chiefly British

the symbol #.

Origin:
1980s: probably from hatch3, altered by folk etymology

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/hatch--3?region=uk

hatch3
verb
[with object]

(in fine art and technical drawing) shade (an area) with closely
drawn parallel lines:
(as noun hatching) "the miniaturist’s use of hatching and
stippling"

Origin:

late 15th century (in the sense 'inlay with strips of metal'): from
Old French hacher, from hache (see hatchet)

In BrE sets of parallel lines crossing is known as "cross-hatching".

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 28, 11:41 am, Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@g{oogle}mail.com>
wrote:

> Peter T. Daniels:
>
> > Loss of culture is orthogonal to loss of language.
>
> Those may be not parallel, but I'm sure they are not
> orthogonal.  Language reflects culture and mentality
> and  thereby  "contains"  it.

Anthropologists generally regard language as a facet of, as part of,
culture.

[Peter T. Daniels]

A heckuva lot better than "octothorp" (a very recent invention
pretending to be archaic).

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 28, 7:16 pm, "Peter Duncanson [BrE]" <m...@peterduncanson.net>
wrote:

> On 28 Jun 2012 15:05:17 -0700, R H Draney <dadoc...@spamcop.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> >=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gTWFycXVlcw==?= filted:
>
> >>R H Draney wrote (28-06-2012 20:17):
> >>> =?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gTWFycXVlcw==?= filted:
>
> >>>> R H Draney wrote (27-06-2012 22:13):
> >>>>> hachure
>
> >>>> Ok... so I'd never heard this word in my life. No, I hadn't. It's
> >>>> impossible. It comes nowhere near my interests (this first time I read this
> >>>> I thought it was some fancy word for azure, though it didn't make much
> >>>> sense), and I don't see how it can venture outside its smallish domain(s).
>
> >>> You never heard "hash marks"?...or wondered why the character that leads off
> >>> "#justinbieber" or whatever leads to it being called a "hash tag"?...r
>
> >>Being familiar with the word 'hash' is not the same as being familiar with
> >>the word 'hachure'.
>
> >But "hachure" is the origin of the word "hash" meaning a pattern of
> >criss-crossing lines....r
>

> Sort of.http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/hash--3?q=hash+sign

>
>     hash3
>
>     noun
>     chiefly British
>
>         the symbol #.
>
>     Origin:
>     1980s: probably from hatch3, altered by folk etymology
>
> http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/hatch--3?region=uk
>
>     hatch3
>     verb
>     [with object]
>
>         (in fine art and technical drawing) shade (an area) with closely
>         drawn parallel lines:
>           (as noun hatching) "the miniaturist’s use of hatching and
>           stippling"
>
>     Origin:
>
>     late 15th century (in the sense 'inlay with strips of metal'): from
>     Old French hacher, from hache (see hatchet)
>
> In BrE sets of parallel lines crossing is known as "cross-hatching".

In AmE, sets of parallel lines crossing are known as 'crosshatching."

[Peter Moylan]

Cheryl wrote:
> On 28/06/2012 1:42 AM, Robert Bannister wrote:
>> On 28/06/12 1:18 AM, Donna Richoux wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I don't care what the circumstances are, it's unlikely that any older
>>> person is suddenly going to become bilingual.
>>
>> In fact, I believe it sometimes happens that an elderly person suddenly
>> becomes monolingual and not always in their birth language, though that
>> is usually the case.
>>
> I've certainly known of a case in which an elderly person lost her
> second language. It was particularly difficult because although her son
> spoke her language fairly well, none of the rest of the family and
> extremely few of the larger community did, so if he was at work or
> asleep, she couldn't communicate with anyone.

I used to know a woman, born in France but living in Australia, whose
daughter never bothered to learn French. When the old woman lost her
English, while living with her daughter, communication ceased entirely.
This was in a small town, so it was rare for visitors to know any French.

--
Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org
For an e-mail address, see my web page.

[Peter Moylan]

Maybe some people call it ground beef.

I call # the hatch sign myself.

[Robert Bannister]

On 28/06/12 7:43 PM, Adam Funk wrote:

> On 2012-06-28, Peter Moylan wrote:
>
>> Most people don't even know that two colours can have completely
>> different spectra but be indistinguishable to human eyes. (For
>> physiological, not cultural, reasons.) Nor do they know that, for that
>> reason, one species can distinguish two colours that another species
>> sees as identical. That's probably why the researchers didn't mention it
>> -- it wouldn't have occurred to them that it might matter.
>

> I saw an interesting demonstration of this a year or so ago. The
> presenter had two white (on the inside) boxes in a dark lecture hall;
> one box had a white light, and the other had an adjustable combination
> of coloured lights. He twiddled the settings until nearly everyone in
> the audience agreed that the second box looked white inside. (Some
> people still thought it was close to white, but not exactly white.)
> Then he stuck a tomato inside each box; the one in box 1 looked right,
> whereas the one in box 2 looked very weird. (He swapped the tomatoes
> to prove that they were identical.)

>
>
>> I think it's generally known that human eyes have only three kinds of

>> colour receptors, but most people don't think about the implications of

>> that. It's entirely plausible that an isolated group could evolve colour
>> receptors that are "tuned" to different frequency responses than those
>> of the wider population.
>

> You could test that with RGB monitors.

>
>
>> Actually, I find it plausible that there would
>> be individual variations even in an homogenous [1] population, and
>> almost beyond contest that there are differences between men and women.
>

> As I mentioned above, not everyone agreed that the presenter had the
> lights "tuned" to white.
>
>
>> [1] By the way, what's the difference between "homogenous" and
>> "homogeneous"? I think of them as different words with different
>> pronunciations, but my spelling checker insists that the former is a
>> misspelling of the latter.
>
> The OED has "homogeneous" as "Of one thing in respect of another, or
> of various things in respect of each other: Of the same kind, nature,
> or character; alike, similar, congruous" from 1641, with the note
> "Forms: Also erron. -genous".
>
> I was under the impression that "homogenous" was merely a common
> misspelling & mispronunciation of "homogeneous" *but* the OED does
> have a specialized "homogenous" as "Biol. = homogenetic adj. 1" (only
> 2 citations in the 1870s) and "Surg. Of transplanted tissue: =
> homoplastic adj. 2" (1919, 1939, 1964).
>
>

When I was in my teens in England, I was used to two words:
"ho-MOJ-unnuss" was milk without cream on top; "hommo (or
hoe-mo)-JEE-nee-uss" described people or things that were more or less
the same.

--
Robert Bannister

[Robert Bannister]

Perhaps the Red Sea was a different colour too back then.


--
Robert Bannister

[Robert Bannister]

But it looks back to front to me. Surely "hatching" comes from
"hachuring" and not the other way round. I think the dictionary is
playing folk etymology.

--
Robert Bannister

[Robert Bannister]

On 28/06/12 11:52 AM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> On Jun 27, 10:52 am, Athel Cornish-Bowden <athel...@yahoo.co.uk>
> wrote:
>> On 2012-06-27 18:05:12 +0200, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> said:
>>> On 2012-06-26, Joachim Pense wrote:
> ...
>
>>>> Monolingual speakers are said to be a more common phenomenon today than
>>>> millenniums ago.
>>
>>> Isn't that the case even compared with a hundred or a few hundred
>>> years ago? I suspect it's also a "first world" problem now: everyone
>>> I've met from Africa or South Asia speaks several languages.
>>
>> Not just Africa and South Asia. Pretty much everyone I've met from
>> Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, much of Eastern
>> Europe, and Germany, speaks at least two. I put Germany last not
>> because it isn't important, but because it illustrates that it's not
>> just in the smaller countries that people are expected to be able to
>> communicate in at least one foreign language. In France and, of course,
>> the UK and US, you can find university professors who are resolutely
>> monoglot, but in Germany it's not hard to find people who clean rooms
>> who can speak English.
>
> It's not hard in America either, if you're including English as a
> second language.

Depending where you are, I imagine it would be easier to find a Spanish
speaker.


--
Robert Bannister

[Robert Bannister]

On 28/06/12 10:27 PM, Cheryl wrote:
> On 28/06/2012 1:55 AM, Robert Bannister wrote:
>
>>
>> I think you are omitting a number of other people involved in foreign
>> trade. At the port and with land-locked countries, anywhere near the
>> borders, it will not just be the businessman, but also the tavern keeper
>> and no doubt his wenches, plus all the people who have dealings with the
>> ships: pilots, chandlers, shipbuilders. When there is a financial
>> incentive, people quickly learn. The main exceptions are English
>> speakers.
>>
>
> Yes, of course, but that would apply mainly in the ports. Before modern
> transportation made it comparatively easy for large numbers of
> travellers to reach places distant from their port of entry (and
> increased the number of ports of entry) a LOT of the population in any
> largish area would never need to speak another language. Of course, the
> smaller the country/tribal lands, the closer they are to people who
> speak another language and the more likely they are to use it.
>

> I think a lot of English speakers never need to use another language for
> financial or other reasons, and moreover, never get to practice any
> language they do try to learn, unless they're of an age and level of
> determination to go to an immersion group somewhere.
>

When we were young, there was a great deal more excuse. Whether you
lived in England, America or Australia, there was a good chance that
unless you lived near a port, you would never hear a foreign language.
Very different in Europe or Asia where the borders are sometimes little
more that lines on a map. However, today in our countries, very few
people would go through life without hearing a number of languages
spoken in the shopping centres and elsewhere.

--
Robert Bannister

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

Perhaps, but George Stewart explained in "Names on the Land" that
apparently descriptive placenames frequently don't refer to a normal
condition but to an unexpected one that was sufficiently noticeable on
a particular occasion to be enshrined in its name. "An Alligator River
is in northern North Carolina at the very edge of their range, where
they were rare enough to be noted." (He gives better examples than
that, but I can't find one at this moment.)
--
athel

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

OK, you're both right, of course. But I meant people from the dominant
culture, not immigrants, and definitely not children of immigrants.


--
athel

[R H Draney]

Peter T. Daniels filted:
>
>On Jun 28, 3:17=A0pm, R H Draney <dadoc...@spamcop.net> wrote:
>>
>> You never heard "hash marks"?...or wondered why the character that leads =

>off
>> "#justinbieber" or whatever leads to it being called a "hash tag"?...r
>
>A heckuva lot better than "octothorp" (a very recent invention
>pretending to be archaic).

For certain very small values of "archaic"; the person who claims to have
originated the term claims to have done so in 1964....r

[António Marques]

Not being a speaker of english, the only hatches I knew of have to do with
eggs/plans or trapdoors. As for 'hash', the only time I was moved to look
into its meaning I stopped at the 'mix of small chopped pieces of salad
stuff' and somehow it seemed to cover everything. I never suspected either
of the words might be of other than germanic origin.

[Adam Funk]

Sure, and I think it's related to "cross-hatching" in technical & some
artistic drawing, but I don't think that's well-known.


--
XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve the problem,
use more.

[Adam Funk]

I just looked in the fridge (in England) & found two jugs of different
brands: "Standardised Pasteurised Homogenised Whole Milk" (thus
capitalized) & "Pasteurised skimmed milk" (which is obviously also
homogenized, but not labelled as such).

I'm pretty sure it was always called "homogenized" rather than
"homogen(e)ous" milk in Virginia too.


--
The internet is quite simply a glorious place. Where else can you find
bootlegged music and films, questionable women, deep seated xenophobia
and amusing cats all together in the same place? [Tom Belshaw]

[Adam Funk]

Come on, it's a fun word (& would make a great village name).


--
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
[Ambrose Bierce]

[Adam Funk]

On 2012-06-28, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> On Jun 28, 10:31 am, Whiskers <catwhee...@operamail.com> wrote:
>> On 2012-06-27, R H Draney <dadoc...@spamcop.net> wrote:
>> > Peter T. Daniels filted:
>>
>> >>If they had wanted to color something orange, they would have found a
>> >>way to do it.
>>
>> >>Gold was represented with yellow, for instance.
>>
>> Unless the real thing or a reasonable imitation was available.  That is
>> still the case.
>
> If you could afford to have your artists gild your mss., you of course
> did so. It's a case of "If you have to ask, then you can't afford to
> buy it."

"Prices available on request"


--
"Mrs CJ and I avoid clichés like the plague."

[Adam Funk]

On 2012-06-28, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> I think you don't realize how close together villages were in pre-
> industrial times; yet they were far enough separated that each one
> developed its own mini-dialectal quirks. Hence the notion (in West
> Africa) of one-day languages, two-day langugages, etc. -- referring to
> how long it took to learn a nearby language.

Is that terminology not also connected with how far away (in travel
time) the other people are?


--
"It is the role of librarians to keep government running in difficult
times," replied Dramoren. "Librarians are the last line of defence
against chaos." (McMullen 2001)

[Peter Duncanson [BrE]]

On Fri, 29 Jun 2012 17:08:28 +1000, Peter Moylan
<inv...@peter.pmoylan.org.invalid> wrote:

>R H Draney wrote:
>> =?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gTWFycXVlcw==?= filted:
>>> R H Draney wrote (28-06-2012 20:17):
>>>> =?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gTWFycXVlcw==?= filted:
>>>>> R H Draney wrote (27-06-2012 22:13):
>>>>>> hachure
>>>>> Ok... so I'd never heard this word in my life. No, I hadn't. It's
>>>>> impossible. It comes nowhere near my interests (this first time I read this
>>>>> I thought it was some fancy word for azure, though it didn't make much
>>>>> sense), and I don't see how it can venture outside its smallish domain(s).
>>>> You never heard "hash marks"?...or wondered why the character that leads off
>>>> "#justinbieber" or whatever leads to it being called a "hash tag"?...r
>>> Being familiar with the word 'hash' is not the same as being familiar with
>>> the word 'hachure'.
>>
>> But "hachure" is the origin of the word "hash" meaning a pattern of
>> criss-crossing lines....r
>>
>>
>Maybe some people call it ground beef.
>
>I call # the hatch sign myself.

It is somewhat similar to the letter haitch.

[Peter Duncanson [BrE]]

On 28 Jun 2012 12:17:44 -0700, R H Draney <dado...@spamcop.net> wrote:

>=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gTWFycXVlcw==?= filted:
>>

>>R H Draney wrote (27-06-2012 22:13):
>>> hachure
>>
>>Ok... so I'd never heard this word in my life. No, I hadn't. It's
>>impossible. It comes nowhere near my interests (this first time I read this
>>I thought it was some fancy word for azure, though it didn't make much
>>sense), and I don't see how it can venture outside its smallish domain(s).
>
>You never heard "hash marks"?...or wondered why the character that leads off
>"#justinbieber" or whatever leads to it being called a "hash tag"?...r

Due to be released in September is an album by will.i.am titled
"#willpower".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willpower_%28will.i.am_album%29

The correct title of this article is #willpower. The substitution
or omission of the # sign is because of technical restrictions.

#willpower is the upcoming, fourth studio album by American rapper
will.i.am, known for his work with The Black Eyed Peas. The album
was confirmed for release on September 24, 2012 by HMV.

[Donna Richoux]

R H Draney <dado...@spamcop.net> wrote:

>António Marques <anton...@sapo.pt>

> >
> >R H Draney wrote (28-06-2012 20:17):

>>> António Marques <anton...@sapo.pt>

> >>>
> >>> R H Draney wrote (27-06-2012 22:13):
> >>>> hachure
> >>>
> >>> Ok... so I'd never heard this word in my life. No, I hadn't. It's
> >>> impossible. It comes nowhere near my interests (this first time I read
> >>> this I thought it was some fancy word for azure, though it didn't make
> >>> much sense), and I don't see how it can venture outside its smallish
> >>> domain(s).
> >>
> >> You never heard "hash marks"?...or wondered why the character that
> >> leads off "#justinbieber" or whatever leads to it being called a "hash
> >> tag"?...r
> >
> >Being familiar with the word 'hash' is not the same as being familiar with
> >the word 'hachure'.
>
> But "hachure" is the origin of the word "hash" meaning a pattern of
> criss-crossing lines....r

That's not what the dictionaries say. "Hatch" as a mark for shading
shows up in English before "hachure" was invented in French or borrowed
into English. The ARTFL French dictionaries shows this order of
appearance:

1606 dictionary -- hache, iron tool to cut wood
1694 dictionary -- hacher, verb, (among other meanings) to make marks in
printing and drawing
1762 dictionary -- hachure, noun, mark used in drawing

Then MW has for English:

1658 5th hatch: line used for shading
1858 -- hachure, noun, short mark used in shading

--
Best -- Donna Richoux

[pensive hamster]

On Jun 28, 5:20 pm, na...@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) wrote:

> Peter Moylan <inva...@peter.pmoylan.org.invalid> wrote:
> > Most people don't even know that two colours can have completely
> > different spectra but be indistinguishable to human eyes. (For
> > physiological, not cultural, reasons.)
>

> It gets better: Identical spectra can also appear as different
> colors.  For example, a white sheet of paper under an incandescent
> light should appear red--but it's still white, because there is
> some compensation for the spectrum of the ambient lighting going
> on.
>

Also, our minds interpret the electrical signals from our eyes, so
that, to some extent, we see what we expect to see. For example, if
you walk along a suburban street at dusk, where people in the houses
have switched on their (incandescent) lights, but not yet drawn the
curtains, the light in the rooms will look quite yellowish to someone
viewing it from outside, in the street. Because the person outside has
adapted their vision and perception to the more bluish daylight (or
the remains of daylight).

But the person inside the room has adapted their vision and perception
to the more yellowish incandescent ambient lighting. Viewing a sheet
of white paper inside the room, they will not see it as yellowish,
they will see it as white. Because they expect to see white, that is
what they see.

When Edwin Land was developing the Polaroid camera, he experimented
with only using two pigments (or two coloured filters for transmitted
light) instead of the more usual three. He found that people can be
induced to see colours that are not there. For example, if you project
a slide that includes a pattern that looks like grass, people will see
it as green, because that is what people expect grass to look like.
Grass is green, obviously. Even if there is no green light in the
projected image, because there are only red and blue filters.

Many years ago, I read "Eye and Brain" by RL Gregory, though I have
forgotten most of it. One of the aspects of "seeing" that this book
examines, is the considerable extent to which the brain processes and
interprets the raw data from the optic nerve, For example, we see the
world upside down, but our brain automatically corrects the image so
that we see the world the right way up. And there are many varieties
of optical illusion which work by tricking the brain into seeing
something which it expects to see, but which isn't actually there.

So I can well believe that people's ability to see, and to distinguish
certain colours, can be very much influenced by their cultural and
linguistic expectations, as per the TV programme which was mentioned
earlier.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 29, 7:09 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> On 2012-06-29, Robert Bannister wrote:
> > On 28/06/12 7:43 PM, Adam Funk wrote:

> >> The OED has "homogeneous" as "Of one thing in respect of another, or
> >> of various things in respect of each other: Of the same kind, nature,
> >> or character; alike, similar, congruous" from 1641, with the note
> >> "Forms: Also erron. -genous".
>
> >> I was under the impression that "homogenous" was merely a common
> >> misspelling & mispronunciation of "homogeneous" *but* the OED does
> >> have a specialized "homogenous" as "Biol. = homogenetic adj. 1" (only
> >> 2 citations in the 1870s) and "Surg. Of transplanted tissue: =
> >> homoplastic adj. 2" (1919, 1939, 1964).
>
> > When I was in my teens in England, I was used to two words:
> > "ho-MOJ-unnuss" was milk without cream on top; "hommo (or
> > hoe-mo)-JEE-nee-uss" described people or things that were more or less
> > the same.
>
> I just looked in the fridge (in England) & found two jugs of different
> brands: "Standardised Pasteurised Homogenised Whole Milk" (thus
> capitalized) & "Pasteurised skimmed milk" (which is obviously also
> homogenized, but not labelled as such).
>
> I'm pretty sure it was always called "homogenized" rather than
> "homogen(e)ous" milk in Virginia too.

Presumably the wording was set by the "Penna Dept. of Agriculture,"
apparently the strictest such authority in the country in the 1950s,
before the FDA started taking the F part of their name seriously,
since just about everything sold in NYC groceries bore their seal of
approval.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 29, 9:54 am, pensive hamster <pensive_hams...@hotmail.co.uk>
wrote:

> On Jun 28, 5:20 pm, na...@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) wrote:
>
> > Peter Moylan <inva...@peter.pmoylan.org.invalid> wrote:
> > > Most people don't even know that two colours can have completely
> > > different spectra but be indistinguishable to human eyes. (For
> > > physiological, not cultural, reasons.)
>
> > It gets better: Identical spectra can also appear as different
> > colors.  For example, a white sheet of paper under an incandescent
> > light should appear red--but it's still white, because there is
> > some compensation for the spectrum of the ambient lighting going
> > on.
>
> Also, our minds interpret the electrical signals from our eyes, so
> that, to some extent, we see what we expect to see. For example, if
> you walk along a suburban street at dusk, where people in the houses
> have switched on their (incandescent) lights, but not yet drawn the
> curtains, the light in the rooms will look quite yellowish to someone
> viewing it from outside, in the street. Because the person outside has
> adapted their vision and perception to the more bluish daylight (or
> the remains of daylight).

The TV screens seen through those windows always were bluish glows.
Does the same effect happen with flatscreens? (Or do people with
flatscreens always close their curtains, so we can't do that any
more?)

[Jerry Friedman]

On Jun 28, 9:10 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Jun 28, 11:41 am, Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@g{oogle}mail.com>
> wrote:
> > Peter T. Daniels:
>
> > > Loss of culture is orthogonal to loss of language.
>
> > Those may be not parallel, but I'm sure they are not
> > orthogonal.  Language reflects culture and mentality
> > and  thereby  "contains"  it.
>
> Anthropologists generally regard language as a facet of, as part of,
> culture.

...

I completely agree with them and thus don't see loss of culture as

orthogonal to loss of language.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Peter T. Daniels]

Yeah -- it was "reed" color. Yam ha-Suf.

[Jerry Friedman]

On Jun 29, 5:09 am, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> On 2012-06-29, Robert Bannister wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On 28/06/12 7:43 PM, Adam Funk wrote:
> >> The OED has "homogeneous" as "Of one thing in respect of another, or
> >> of various things in respect of each other: Of the same kind, nature,
> >> or character; alike, similar, congruous" from 1641, with the note
> >> "Forms: Also erron. -genous".
>
> >> I was under the impression that "homogenous" was merely a common
> >> misspelling & mispronunciation of "homogeneous" *but* the OED does
> >> have a specialized "homogenous" as "Biol. = homogenetic adj. 1" (only
> >> 2 citations in the 1870s) and "Surg. Of transplanted tissue: =
> >> homoplastic adj. 2" (1919, 1939, 1964).
>
> > When I was in my teens in England, I was used to two words:
> > "ho-MOJ-unnuss" was milk without cream on top; "hommo (or
> > hoe-mo)-JEE-nee-uss" described people or things that were more or less
> > the same.
>
> I just looked in the fridge (in England) & found two jugs of different
> brands: "Standardised Pasteurised Homogenised Whole Milk" (thus
> capitalized) & "Pasteurised skimmed milk" (which is obviously also
> homogenized, but not labelled as such).

Skim(med) milk isn't homogenized, since it doesn't have any cream that
could separate out if you didn't homogenize it.

> I'm pretty sure it was always called "homogenized" rather than
> "homogen(e)ous" milk in Virginia too.

"Homogenized" is all I've ever heard in America.

--
Jerry Friedman

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 28, 4:58 pm, Whiskers <catwhee...@operamail.com> wrote:

> On 2012-06-28, Peter T. Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Jun 28, 10:31 am, Whiskers <catwhee...@operamail.com> wrote:
> >> On 2012-06-27, R H Draney <dadoc...@spamcop.net> wrote:
> >> > Peter T. Daniels filted:
>
> >> >>If they had wanted to color something orange, they would have found a
> >> >>way to do it.
>
> >> >>Gold was represented with yellow, for instance.
>
> >> Unless the real thing or a reasonable imitation was available.  That is
> >> still the case.
>
> > If you could afford to have your artists gild your mss., you of course
> > did so. It's a case of "If you have to ask, then you can't afford to
> > buy it."
>

> >> > And both can be represented with a stippling of black dots...I've always found
> >> > the monochrome representation of colors in heraldry intriguing...were people
> >> > learning the practice supposed to make a natural assumption that one pattern of
> >> > hachure was red while another was green, or was it understood that the
> >> > assignments were arbitrary?...certainly the lightest and darkest, an unmarked
> >> > area for argent/white and a dense cross-hatch for sable/black, suggest at least
> >> > some attempt at representation....
>
> >> > (ObSomethingOrOther: the only word in the above that Firefox doesn't like the
> >> > spelling of is "hachure")....r
>
> >> The "Petra Sancta" system?  That is merely a conventional substitution
> >> of a particular pattern of fine lines or grooves for each of the seven
> >> heraldic colours.  I can't imagine any direct connection between any
> >> colour and any particular pattern of grooves.
>
> > Armorials were quite handsomely painted, in real colors.
>
> > Was the monochrome system even invented before printing made some sort
> > of accommodation necessary?
>
> >> Book printers also use a rather more subtle system of dots and lines to
> >> stand in for colours and brightness, or these days electronically
> >> convert a colour image into monochrome and then apply a 'half-tone'
> >> filter or something of the sort to suit the final printing process.
>
> People wanted their 'arms' to be marked on metal table-ware and carved
> into wood and stone, and on seals and signet-rings, so a standard way of
> representing the colours in 'no colour' materials must have been quite
> important.  There would also have been a need for wood-cut or hand-drawn
> depictions in monochrome; not all those who needed to recognise the
> 'arms' of their war-leader would have been literate, nor would the
> artisans expected to create the more expensive full-colour versions.

I rarely go through the "decorative arts" galleries at the Met Museum,
but the next time I'm there (I _still_ haven't seen the reinstallation
of what used to be called the Islamic galleries), I'll look out for
Medieval tableware.

*The Complete Book of Heraldry* by Slater (2003;I think it was a
Bargain Book) is heavily photo-illustrated, and wooden depictions seem
always to have been painted; depictions in stone (such as sarcophagus
lids and building facades) show no trace of hachure and may well have
been painted also.

Printing by woodcuts preceded Gutenberg by only a few decades.

[Peter T. Daniels]

> of the words might be of other than germanic origin.-

The most immediate sense of "hash" refers to what you do with leftover
leftover meat -- you chop it up real fine, along with potatoes and a
distinctive seasoning, and fry it up. The canned meat packers
traditionally offer corned beef hash and roast beef hash, and recently
they've added turkey hash.

I don't know of a "salad" version -- in recent years, they've started
talking about "chopped salad," which sounds like a lazy way to do it,
since our cookbooks always said you must tear, not cut, the (lettuce)
leaves for salad.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 29, 7:44 am, "Peter Duncanson [BrE]" <m...@peterduncanson.net>
wrote:

There is no H and the front of "aitch."

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 29, 8:31 am, t...@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux) wrote:
> R H Draney <dadoc...@spamcop.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>

> >António Marques <antonio...@sapo.pt>

>
> > >R H Draney wrote (28-06-2012 20:17):

> >>> António Marques <antonio...@sapo.pt>

>
> > >>> R H Draney wrote (27-06-2012 22:13):
> > >>>> hachure
>
> > >>> Ok... so I'd never heard this word in my life. No, I hadn't. It's
> > >>> impossible. It comes nowhere near my interests (this first time I read
> > >>> this I thought it was some fancy word for azure, though it didn't make
> > >>> much sense), and I don't see how it can venture outside its smallish
> > >>> domain(s).
>
> > >> You never heard "hash marks"?...or wondered why the character that
> > >> leads off "#justinbieber" or whatever leads to it being called a "hash
> > >> tag"?...r
>
> > >Being familiar with the word 'hash' is not the same as being familiar with
> > >the word 'hachure'.
>
> > But "hachure" is the origin of the word "hash" meaning a pattern of
> > criss-crossing lines....r
>
> That's not what the dictionaries say. "Hatch" as a mark for shading
> shows up in English before "hachure" was invented in French or borrowed
> into English. The ARTFL French dictionaries shows this order of
> appearance:
>
> 1606 dictionary -- hache, iron tool to cut wood
> 1694 dictionary -- hacher, verb, (among other meanings) to make marks in
> printing and drawing
> 1762 dictionary -- hachure, noun, mark used in drawing
>
> Then MW has for English:
>
> 1658 5th hatch: line used for shading

Do you have an MW that puts dates on individual senses, rather than at
the head of the whole entry? That would be super-useful.

[James Silverton]

I went to a lecture by Land and one of his demonstrations was to display
a properly colored US flag. He then interchanged the slides in the
projectors and the flag immediately showed as green, white and orange so
expectation is not everything. The "colors" he was projecting were red
and white.

--
Jim Silverton (Potomac, MD)

Extraneous "not" in Reply To.

[pensive hamster]

On Jun 29, 3:10 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Jun 29, 9:54 am, pensive hamster <pensive_hams...@hotmail.co.uk>
> wrote:

[...]

> > Also, our minds interpret the electrical signals from our eyes, so
> > that, to some extent, we see what we expect to see. For example, if
> > you walk along a suburban street at dusk, where people in the houses
> > have switched on their (incandescent) lights, but not yet drawn the
> > curtains, the light in the rooms will look quite yellowish to someone
> > viewing it from outside, in the street. Because the person outside has
> > adapted their vision and perception to the more bluish daylight (or
> > the remains of daylight).
>
> The TV screens seen through those windows always were bluish glows.
> Does the same effect happen with flatscreens? (Or do people with
> flatscreens always close their curtains, so we can't do that any
> more?)
>

I can't recall ever having seen a TV screen directly from outside*, I
guess people round here mostly orientate their TVs so they can't be
seen from outside. But I have looked into a room at dusk, where I
think the only light was the TV (because the light flickered,
presumably as the TV picture changed), and the light from the TV
(reflected off the walls and out the window) did appear a slightly
greenish blue. Though that could have been partly due to the colour of
the walls.

* I have seen TVs in the window of a High Street electrical retailer.
In that case the TV colour looked 'normal', though I daresay the
retailer might have adjusted the colour so that it looked normal to
someone viewing from the street.

[Peter Duncanson [BrE]]

You would therefore be be unhappy listening to British radio and TV on
which referring to the letter H as "haitch" is increasingly prevalent.
It is treated as a dialectal variation and therefore sacrosanct.

[Lanarcam]

What they say, here:

Ca 1140 « instrument tranchant à long manche, servant
d'arme offensive » (Geffrei Gaimar, Hist. des Anglais,
éd. A. Bell, 537);

Instrument with a cutting-edge and a long handle,
used as an attack weapon.

"De happja, mot a. h. all. du domaine frq.
(happia, happa, heppa « hache de bûcheron », "

So, it is orginally a Germanic word.

[R H Draney]

Peter Duncanson [BrE]" <ma...@peterduncanson.net> filted:

>
>Due to be released in September is an album by will.i.am titled
>"#willpower".
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willpower_%28will.i.am_album%29
>
> The correct title of this article is #willpower. The substitution
> or omission of the # sign is because of technical restrictions.
>
> #willpower is the upcoming, fourth studio album by American rapper
> will.i.am, known for his work with The Black Eyed Peas. The album
> was confirmed for release on September 24, 2012 by HMV.

It should be interesting to hear how people pronounce the title when it comes
out...will they say "willpower", "pound willpower", "number willpower", "sharp
willpower" or "tic-tac-toe willpower"?...

Recently I've been hearing about a group called "Fun." with the full stop
included as part of the official name...makes for some interesting but
difficult-to-read articles in the traditional press....r

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 29, 10:39 am, James Silverton <jim.silver...@verizon.net>
wrote:

> On 6/29/2012 10:10 AM, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

[nothing that was responded to below. If you had nothing to say about
whether non-CRT TVs look bluish at a distance, you should not have
replied to me.]

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Jun 29, 11:40 am, "Peter Duncanson [BrE]" <m...@peterduncanson.net>
wrote:

Is it so referred to by persons who normally have the intrusive
(hypercorrect) h?