Re: The 20 new gismu

["Arthur W. Protin Jr." (GC-ACCURATE) <cbmvax!uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin>]

Folks,
    Ivan Derzhanski <iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu> argues against
two colors:
> I have never used the English words "magenta" and "cyan", and I have
> only seen them in PC reference manuals (two of the screen colours),
> not in real life.
and then unwittingly undermines his position by suggesting
> that it is so easy to build a tanru for a particular shade
> of any of the basic colours,
    Apparently Ivan missed some of the basic theory.  The vast
majority of humanity share certain physical properties, like
only seeing three colors.  Every variation we enjoy is really
detected as some combination of those three.  Given our limited
ability to detect colors, every shape is forgable from mixing
either three colors of light (red, green, and blue) or three
colors of pigment (cyan, magenta, and yellow).  Thus the eight
fundamental colors ("basic colours") are white, yellow, red,
magenta, green, cyan, blue, and black (other triplet are possible
but these have been accepted as the standard world wide, by
the graphic arts industry, the film industry, and all of video
electronics.  The momentary (on language evolution scale) failure
of any natural language to establish terms for these concepts
should not be taken as grounds for our failure to do so.

    I would be surprised to find that Russian did not have a 
word for tapioca.

    thank you,
    Art Protin


Arthur Protin <protin@pica.army.mil>
These are my personal views and do not reflect those of my boss
or this installation.