gems, color science, color theory, historical ancient reference on color

Does the categorisation of colours follow directly from the physiological mechanisms of perception, or do individual languages and cultures divide up colour space in idiosyncratic ways? For centuries academe has heard reports or rumours of exotic peoples whose colour systems seem irreconcilable with those of the English language. We still read of the Hanunóo of the Philippines, who were found to have a subtle vocabulary for colour contrasts but no definite names for absolute values of hue, and of the Dani of Papua New Guinea with their ‘cool’ term and ‘warm’ term, mola and mili, but no other colour words at all; while at the other extreme lies the Irish partition of what English calls ‘green’ between three distinct categories glas, uaine, bui, and the Russian perception that light blue and dark blue, goluboi and siniĭ, constitute distinct and incommensurate entities rather than subsets of a single category. However, over the past thirty years scholarly views on the language of colour have followed the overall movement in the human sciences, away from trust in cultural relativism and towards the adoption of a squarely universalist paradigm: with the result that any handbook of semantics currently in print will tell you that colour terms are part of the innate shared equipment of the human language faculty and do not vary significantly from language to language. In Steven Pinker’s words, “Humans the world over colour their perceptual worlds using the same palette, and this constrains the vocabularies they develop… The way we see colours determines the way we learn words for them, and not vice versa.” Trust in significant cross-linguistic variation between colour categories is likely nowadays to be regarded as outmoded or — even worse — as quaintly middlebrow. With the exception of the incisive work of John Lucy, it is hard to cite recent research that argues against Pinker’s breezy confidence.