but to the
australian aborigine an aranda say among the aranda
there is i take it a different way of looking at all this or at
least a different way of talking about what we have just been
looking at for in aranda in the vernacular aranda system
as it existed in the 19th century there were according to the
people familiar with them four or actually five
fundamental color terms two blacks white red
and one other term for all the rest one black was purka
used of charcoal and the other was urupulla which included
brown and a fair range of greys white was churungura
red tutuka and the other was tierga the sky was tierga a
green leaf was tierga and yellow ocher was also tierga
now this is a
very different system for talking about seeing than ours one
for red and one for the range of blue yellow and green
i have no doubt
that we could persuade any reasonable aranda gentleman or lady
to distinguish between sky color leaf color and the color ocher
and they could do this very handily this gentleman or lady
an aranda painter maybe they could say that of course
one was sky tierga the other was leaf tierga and the last was
ocher tierga but that they were merely three different shades of
the same color tierga that is that they were all the
same color but modified by some other aspect of vision that
weve chosen to call « shade » which would be somewhat similar
to our « light » and « dark » or « deep » or « thin » or « saturated » or
« not » but we really wouldnt have any appropriate name for
this feature of vision that we have just called « shade » but which
applies to a somewhat different range of visual experiences
because their word « color » would also not apply to quite the
same visual experiences of looking as ours or would apply in
a different way so their word « shade » which would
depend for its significance on their word « color » as our word
« shade » depends on our word « color » would not be at all
the same and we would simply not have any word for it that
came conveniently to hand though we might very well know what
they mean by it
and this leads to interesting conclusions
because it seems that « blue » occupies a different semantic space
to use our old formalist conception of word meaning a
different semantic space than our word « blue » and that not only
that their conception of « color » probably has a different
spatial configuration in the semantic domain of aranda looking
than our notion « color »
21 02 16