ABSTRACT

Every human being is creative both in putting together novel statements and in employing them in various speech situations. Since human beings are both with the same senses and approximately the same degree of intelligence, they should be able to report equally well whatever they experience. But different languages make such equality difficult to achieve. People elsewhere in the world, who speak languages unrelated to European ones, have their own ways of partitioning the color spectrum. The way people talk about the color spectrum, and even perceive it, varies from one speech community to another, although all human eyes see the same colors because colors have their own reality in the physical world. The convenient labels that a speech community gives to certain colors are a great aid in remembering them, but the absence of such labels does not prohibt a community from talking about the low-codability colors.