Generalidades de la Estimación de costo.

In Chapter 1 I already briefly mentioned that not everyone acknowledges BCTs and BCCs.

Saunders believes BCCs are invented by the anglocentric tradition in colour studies and Van Brakel concurs by pointing out the only ‘evidence’ for BCCs is empirical, and that empirical evidence is not sufficient grounds to base categories upon (1993: 111). Also McNeill (1972) is opposed to the idea of a natural division of the spectrum (1972: 21).

It is easy to assume that colour is not a universal concept when standardised tests such as colour naming tasks aided by the Munsell chips do not wield results in every language. We can not conclude from this that not every language has colour terms: the only conclusion we can draw from it is that abstract colour categories are not universal. This is exactly the problem of the Munsell colour chips, which embody abstract colour categories, devoid of any other perceptual qualities such as texture, surroundings, shape, size, glossiness, glitter, glow, etc. No comprehensive theory of colour appearance can be based only on the properties hue, saturation, and brightness (Saunders and Van Brakel 1997: 175). By extension, this methodology is also why the Berlin and Kay paradigm has been subject to much critique over the years.

Saunders reified this problem when her informants did not know how to respond to the Munsell chart, but could only answer questions about coloured beads and fruits (see section 1.4.2). This example points out that colour categorisation is relative from one language to another. Van Brakel also has problems with the use of the Munsell chips, saying that 95% of the world’s colour words are eliminated by its use (1993: 112). Hardin’s response to Saunders and Van Brakel’s resistance towards the decontextualising properties of this system was that it can also be seen as an advantage: replacing real systems with ideal ones has been a standard and effective technique of scientific inquiry, the fact that we now know which features are excluded by the Munsell chips (which should not be excluded) shows how much we have learned by using colour chips in controlled environments (Hardin 1997: 190).

In the case of Irish, the colour spectrum does not seem to be divided in the same way as in English – or many other West European (i.e. Germanic) languages for that matter. There are arguably two macro categories which cover different parts of the spectrum of what English speakers call green and blue, this demarcation shall be discussed in section 4.3.1.

4.1.1 universality of senses

Wierzbicka claims that not the semantics of colour, but instead the semantics of vision are univer- sal (2008: 410). Hardin points out that when we perceive an object, we do not perceive a physical object, but a perceptual object (Hardin 1992: 37). The same holds true for colour: it can be argued that when we perceive colour, it is our own subjective experience of perception that we interpret as the external reality. Other senses such as touch, taste, hearing, and smell all involve physical confir- mation by more than one sensory organ, colour is accessed only by sight, which cannot be physi- cally corroborated and thus only ‘exists’ as a concept in our minds (Finlay 2007: 401). But is colour really a subjective experience? Is colour a property of objects or a property of the mind? An objecti- vist approach to colour holds that colour is a property of objects, whether or not they are perceived by human beings and a subjectivist view may lead to the conclusion that variation in colour vision leads to variation in scene segmentation (Hilbert 1992: 38). This is perhaps what the universalist- relativist debate comes down to in the end; it can be regarded as ‘offspring’ of the early opposition in works on colour by Newton and Goethe. Newton regarded colour as being in our head, whereas Goethe opted that colour is in the world (Finlay 2007: 386).

4.1.2 dividing the spectrum

In section 1.4.1, I discussed Carey’s (2009: 221) polarity between black and white, which does not exist between the colours of the spectrum according to him, and thus forming a continuum. Yet, a lot of the literature on the neurophysiology of colour – which I shall not further discuss here – points out two additional physiological polarities of visual perception: yellow-blue and green-red (Wooten and Miller 1997: 70). Each of these channels forms a polarity, rather than a continuum: red can be mixed with blue or yellow, but not with green, there is no such hue as ‘greenish red’ or ‘reddish green’ (McNeill 1972: 29). If red predominates the mixture we obtain unsaturated tones of red and if green predominates we obtain unsaturated tones of green.

Under these terms, an Irish colour term such as glasrua does not refer to ‘greenish red’ but to an unsaturated subset of red, or to a greyish tone of red. This ‘polarity’ compound seems to be the only one included in the FGB dictionary, yet it does not have any tokens in the NCE, and only one of my informants (informant 9) recognised it as a colour compound. My informants did mention these other ‘polarity’ compounds: dubhgeal (lit. ‘black-white’ or ‘black-bright’; informants 3, 9, 10, 15, and 16); buíghorm (lit. ‘yellow-blue’; informants 13 and 18); deargghlas (lit. red-grue’;

also seem to have colour words that denote polarities: Pukapuka (Cook Islands) has a colour term that translates into English as ‘yellow, blue’ (McNeill 1972: 24-25), and Karajá (Brazil) and Lele (Chad) both have terms that denote yellow or green or blue (information obtained from the Typological Database System).

These polarities, which are physiological channels of colour vision, do not influence colour perception or classification. The way the colour spectrum is divided into discrete colours, can still be culturally dependent: to state there is no intermediary hue between red and green is just as

subjective as to state that a technologically advanced society should have a term for pink and/or orange.