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From: kmaroney@crossover.com (Kevin J. Maroney)
Subject: Re: Dialects (Was Re: Shakespeare's Future)
Message-ID: <332f7c9e.19721393@news.crossover.com>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 21:31:14 GMT
References: <5ett24$fdo@agate.berkeley.edu> <5f346d$hfi@halley.pi.net> <01bc252f$68d966e0$c8203fce@brianwi.halcyon.com> <5fhptn$6jh@nntp5.u.washington.edu> <5fkfc0$rh@universe.digex.net>
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Sorry to follow-up from a follow-up...

In article <5fhptn$6jh@nntp5.u.washington.edu>,
Mary K. Kuhner <mkkuhner@phylo.genetics.washington.edu> wrote:

>I have a blouse which is right on many peoples' blue/green border, and
>it's amusing to ask people what color it is.  I don't think this is a
>perceptual difference, but a psychological one--after all, the color
>spectrum is continuous, so where you draw the line is a decision.

One of the few experiments which provides any support for any form of
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis worked something like this: 

The experimenters made a sheet of paper printed in continuous color
spectra and asked the subjects to indicate areas of a specific
color--that is, draw a line around the area that they considered
"red", considered "yellow", etc. 

People of various native languages tended to define the color regions
tended to define the colors in ways that were consistent with their
language and different from other languages.

What's this got to do with SF? I dunno.

Kevin Maroney | kmaroney@crossover.com
Kitchen Staff Supervisor
The New York Review of Science Fiction
http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html

