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I'm curious if anyone would have any ideas on this idea...
The idea is to produce a language using light rather than sound

my first thought was Would it be better to produce multiple colors at the same time, or produce a series of colors in a string of colors.
The second option seems best because having just all the colors at once would be too hard to see and comprehend right, so let's go with that.

Secondly what colors can be produced and how?
I was thinking I was going to go with just 8 colors (ROYGBIV+W), but I feel that the people who would use this would likely be able to differentiate colors more easily and 8 colors isn't a lot. Not to mention it only allows you to produce a certain number of the colors we would think about so I thought about it and looked briefly into color theory and there are several aspects of color to consider, but also how would you go about producing those aspects... I came to the conclusion that the best way probably to allow to colors to be shown at once at different brightnesses.

That's where I'm at right now...
I haven't consider whether each color is a word or if a word is made of a string of colors.

I also have no clue how this language would be written, but I think that it could only be decided after deciding the thing about string or sing color = word. I know you have to have 4 bits of information in the written language, Color 1, Brightness of Color 1, Color 2 and Brightness of color 2.

And something i have even less of a clue on... how one would even remotely translating this language to a spoken language.

yellow, yellow, bright yellow, dark yellow, yellow, blue, blue, red, dark red
hit hit hit.Pl hit.COL hit bruised-eye bruised-eye blood blood.COL

Since normal human eyes detect three base colors, you could at least expand your phote inventory to R G B, and then shade, tint, and saturate them as needed, along with combining colors in balanced and imbalanced ratios.

legolasean wrote:yellow, yellow, bright yellow, dark yellow, yellow, blue, blue, red, dark red
hit hit hit.Pl hit.COL hit bruised-eye bruised-eye blood blood.COL

I would imagine that would take a long time to write/read and take up a lot of space. As such isn't a good system probably imo.

sano wrote:Why not expand the base vocab?

Ouagadougou wrote:Since normal human eyes detect three base colors, you could at least expand your phote inventory to R G B, and then shade, tint, and saturate them as needed, along with combining colors in balanced and imbalanced ratios.

All colors that we can see are simply a combination of 3 colors and various lightings. However, in terms of "producing" the hues, tints, saturation, brightness, the only way i can think of doing it without getting to complicated is that the creature can produce Every color in visible color range (so 360 colors) but keeps to a certain group of colors for simplicity. This takes care of Hues, but tints and saturations are needed for colors like Pink and and 2 colors are needed for Grey, brown, etc So you throw in a second color and it fixes that problem and Producing different brightness and colors in the second light creates the saturation/tint. Brightness can then be achieved by simply keeping the ratio of the former two... i think. I haven't done tests with lights to see if this works.

So taking into consideration only Hue combinations you can produce 129,600 colors. With the brightness variation, depending on how it works you can produce way more.

Of course if we used RGB+Brightness it might be easier. The problem i see with that is does putting up Red Green and Blue lights next too each other and combined make black? Is producing light that is black possible? This may be an incredibly stupid question, but I just figured that "black" in screens is produced by not lighting the pixel at all raher than lighting it completely.

so for us partially colorblind, crap and crepe would be homonyms?

hello, I'd like a raspberry crap, please.

At least you can have a good base inventory.

/black white grey red green blue purple orange/ or something. The thought of "allophotes" makes me giggle.

how bout

instead of the 8 color things they can create Red Green Blue and brightness in various purities/levels...
And there are 6 purities, 0, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, 100%
This would make 1,296 characters if each possibility was individual.
I was thinking that it might be better to have characters that have 4 quadrants and each quadrant denotes the purity/level if a particular color/brightness

Skomakar'n wrote:At least you can have a good base inventory.

/black white grey red green blue purple orange/ or something. The thought of "allophotes" makes me giggle.

well interestingly blue and green are often considered the same color and blue and grey is sometimes... i could see blue and purple being considered the same color and i often consider orange and brown more or less the same color, despite them not being quite.



I'm thinking that perhaps colors with 100% in 1 of colors and Brightness, and 0% in the other 2 are equivalent to vowels

Since my magic system requires there to be sentient versions of pretty much everything (or sapient versions, depending on your definitions of each), and most of my conworld is inhabited by such beings, I decided the easiest thing to do would be to give them all a sort of magically articulated language which humans could not produce.
Thus, Xem Lipan Xen Galiliwaa Wüttäwää (The Voice of the Six Little Lights Informally: Xen Galiin, The Little Light), a language which can be spoken by every sentient creature except humans, dolphins, porpoises, shrews, and whales. At this point, it's just a rough concept, but it's spoken with magical lights.
There are six lights, or "galilin", which arrange themselves in a sort of hexagonal shape. They are only visible when they come into contact with each other. One galiin moves to the position of another, and when they touch, they appear as a certain color depending on their original spatial relationships.
Galiin moves to galiin opposite itself= black
Galiin moves to non-adjacent galiin clockwise from itself= red
Galiin moves to non-adjacent galiin counterclockwise from itself= blue
Galiin moves to adjacent galiin clockwise from itself= green
Galiin moves to adjacent galiin counterclockwise from itself= white.
With six possible destination galilin, each having the potential to be combines with the five besides itself, this gives us 30 possible phonemes.
While the lights produced are very faint, (every creature besides HDPSaW perceives it on a more "metaphysical" level as well), this is the only way to understand it as a human, so it's kind of similar to what you were talking about.

Vowel: Brightness = 5 & Colors are 0 or 5

Each language in color would likely have 4 vowels;
Blue/Lime/Cyan = invisible/water/land/sky/forest
Red/Fuschia = fire/heat/blood/life/warning
Yellow = sickness/ fear/ danger
White = abundance/wholeness

And while there are 1,296 possible color variations in this set up I don't see why any language would do that instead I think I'd rather take the same tact as verbal languages which on average have 4.25 consonants to vowels. So any color light language taking this would likely have 17-30 consonants used.

I also see that Brightness would be something like an accent...

So, starting off... i think these vowels should work
Lime
Cyan
Red
Yellow
White

Leaving out blue, for this language, because blue is likely hard to see in any environment as either being too dark or the environ is blue in general anyways.

This would mean roughly 21 consonant colors. Have no idea how to select these.

Next step i think for this is to create an IPA type thing for colors...

I think the best way to divide colors is Warmth on 1 axis and brightness on the other

So a darker color is more of a mumble and brighter is louder sorta... I don' know how timbre reflects in languages, but brightness would reflect an accent of some sort I think.
Groups in darker areas might have "brighter" accents and when out in a city might be consider over active because of it.

Stop = low brightness > High brightness (tend to be warm colors)
Trill = jittery (tend to be warm colors)
Nasal = High Brightness > low brightness (tend to cool colors)
Fricative = continuous (tend to be cool colors)

Also while thinking about this i think something like a "bleed" of colors would happen naturally so faster talkers in this language would have their colors bleed together while those who are more slow have less bleed which would be sorta like enunciation

I've had a similar idea, only instead of the languages being intended for humans it would be for squids since their brain is already hardwired to interpret advanced color patterns.

There is apparently a IPA Colerbet thing. I don't like it personally. It doesn't really work and that's the only other color language I've seen.

I don't want to sound arrogant but I think that what I've come up with so far is waaay better than that chart simply because this takes into account language rules in general more so than it does which makes it more realistic ^.^

What about tetrachromats?

Skomakar'n wrote:The thought of "allophotes" makes me giggle.

would they not be allochromes ?

sano wrote:What about tetrachromats?

Why?

Torco wrote:

Skomakar'n wrote:The thought of "allophotes" makes me giggle.

would they not be allochromes?

Do you mean Allophones... I prefer Allosaurus.

Durakken wrote:

sano wrote:What about tetrachromats?

Why?

Might they be hyper-fluent? Or speak (recognize) an almost unintelligible dialect?

I'm not sure how it would appear to an entity so I can't really figure out how it would work. As far as I understand it is that the organism can pick up a 4th color wavelength at whatever setting it is. Considering we only see in 3 colors and all other colors are combinations of the wavelength that that makes up with those primes being the most vibrant to us more or less. I'd imagine it'd be the same for a tetrachomat...just with fourth color as a prime.

It seems to me that the idea of representing each phoneme with a color is remarkably similar to finger-spelling in ASL (i.e. tedious, slow, and, if used solely, difficult to keep up with in conversation). More complex motions or flashes would surely develop in a similar manner to how wordsigns were formed in ASL. Since this is a visual language, it may be worth your time to take a look at sign languages like ASL or maybe even drawing some inspiration from logographic scripts.

Ccaccus wrote:It seems to me that the idea of representing each phoneme with a color is remarkably similar to finger-spelling in ASL (i.e. tedious, slow, and, if used solely, difficult to keep up with in conversation). More complex motions or flashes would surely develop in a similar manner to how wordsigns were formed in ASL. Since this is a visual language, it may be worth your time to take a look at sign languages like ASL or maybe even drawing some inspiration from logographic scripts.

what do you mean with "how wordsigns were formed in ASL"? How were they formed?
The logographic thing I considered a bit already. I don't know how useful it would be to use something similar like 1 color = 1 thing. The only way you could do that is if you made it really stand out apart from the other lights. Obviously it is possible to have 1000ish words with this system, but I think it would be even more problematic than simply more of a phonemic style

Durakken wrote:

Ccaccus wrote:It seems to me that the idea of representing each phoneme with a color is remarkably similar to finger-spelling in ASL (i.e. tedious, slow, and, if used solely, difficult to keep up with in conversation). More complex motions or flashes would surely develop in a similar manner to how wordsigns were formed in ASL. Since this is a visual language, it may be worth your time to take a look at sign languages like ASL or maybe even drawing some inspiration from logographic scripts.

what do you mean with "how wordsigns were formed in ASL"? How were they formed?
The logographic thing I considered a bit already. I don't know how useful it would be to use something similar like 1 color = 1 thing. The only way you could do that is if you made it really stand out apart from the other lights. Obviously it is possible to have 1000ish words with this system, but I think it would be even more problematic than simply more of a phonemic style

They were formed by fully utilizing the motions and space available to them. For example, one thing I really like about ASL that I never noticed before was the use of the Referent locus system - marking a noun in a specific point in space and simply referring back to that point in space to mention it again. I've used ASL my whole life and I never paid attention to things like that, it just seemed normal to me.

Let's say the organism using this language is a ball of light. Merely being able to go up, down, front, back, left, and right from their initial starting location, adds 26 additional dimensions to your words, and that does not include what you do when in those spacial areas. Rotating, shaking back and forth, moving up and down, flashing, etc.

As for a logographic system, rather than 1 color = 1 word, why not use them more like radicals? 1 motion, 1 color, and 1 point in space relative to the initial starting point correspond to 1 morpheme, which produce meaning when combined with others.

This reminds me of Solresol, a language based on the musical scale.
It had a visual component using colors as well.
There are seven notes in the scale and 7 colors in the Roy G. Biv spectrum.
This was the language used to communicate with the aliens in Close Encounters.
Check out this link for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol

Also, there are squids and other cephalopods that can change the color of their skin swiftly using chromatophores.
They can make patterns and shift the colors around very rapidly. Many think that they use this ability to communicate with other squids. Whether these communications are just simple threat or courting displays or a more complex language is the subject of continued study. Some think that squids that hunt in packs (like the Humboldt squid) can use this language to coordinate attacks on prey.

Ccaccus wrote:

Durakken wrote:

Ccaccus wrote:It seems to me that the idea of representing each phoneme with a color is remarkably similar to finger-spelling in ASL (i.e. tedious, slow, and, if used solely, difficult to keep up with in conversation). More complex motions or flashes would surely develop in a similar manner to how wordsigns were formed in ASL. Since this is a visual language, it may be worth your time to take a look at sign languages like ASL or maybe even drawing some inspiration from logographic scripts.

what do you mean with "how wordsigns were formed in ASL"? How were they formed?
The logographic thing I considered a bit already. I don't know how useful it would be to use something similar like 1 color = 1 thing. The only way you could do that is if you made it really stand out apart from the other lights. Obviously it is possible to have 1000ish words with this system, but I think it would be even more problematic than simply more of a phonemic style

They were formed by fully utilizing the motions and space available to them. For example, one thing I really like about ASL that I never noticed before was the use of the Referent locus system - marking a noun in a specific point in space and simply referring back to that point in space to mention it again. I've used ASL my whole life and I never paid attention to things like that, it just seemed normal to me.

Let's say the organism using this language is a ball of light. Merely being able to go up, down, front, back, left, and right from their initial starting location, adds 26 additional dimensions to your words, and that does not include what you do when in those spacial areas. Rotating, shaking back and forth, moving up and down, flashing, etc.

As for a logographic system, rather than 1 color = 1 word, why not use them more like radicals? 1 motion, 1 color, and 1 point in space relative to the initial starting point correspond to 1 morpheme, which produce meaning when combined with others.

The thing this is for is a Fairy, btw.
The problem i see with the positioning thing is how hard that would be, not to "do," but it would result in problem with communication when moving, like when you are walking down the street. I could see it used in "some" languages from this family like when communicating with a human whom they can move faster than and so can use that, but if you have 2 fairies flying at max speed to go into battle you can't go faster or fall back or something weird like that. ASL pretty much assumes that you're going to be looking at them and standing still. With light I think it is just a little better simply because you can be brighter and you can catch it out of the side of your eye or just turn your head or something.

I could see a logographic system for the IPA as an Light to Audio conversion but I'm not sure for native Fairy languages. I don't see how it would work, unless i create some specialized language.

Durakken wrote:[snip]The thing this is for is a Fairy, btw.
The problem i see with the positioning thing is how hard that would be, not to "do," but it would result in problem with communication when moving, like when you are walking down the street. I could see it used in "some" languages from this family like when communicating with a human whom they can move faster than and so can use that, but if you have 2 fairies flying at max speed to go into battle you can't go faster or fall back or something weird like that. ASL pretty much assumes that you're going to be looking at them and standing still. With light I think it is just a little better simply because you can be brighter and you can catch it out of the side of your eye or just turn your head or something.

I could see a logographic system for the IPA as an Light to Audio conversion but I'm not sure for native Fairy languages. I don't see how it would work, unless i create some specialized language.

Actually, my mom and I can sign and walk (or drive, ride a horse, run, swim underwater) at the same time - sign language /doesn't/ assume you'll be stationary. There are even built-in redundancies, such as mouthing words during a sign to clarify meaning between similar signs which, in your case, would be resolved by color-changing.

I was only using a ball of light and a 3x3x3 cube to simplify the idea of utilizable space. From experience with finger-spelling, visually representing a language phoneme-by-phoneme quickly becomes very unwieldy and tiring, for both speaker and listener, especially when representing complex ideas and thoughts. While changing colors isn't as physical as changing handshapes, I'd imagine that there's some kind of energy cost involved. In my personal opinion, this type of language would fit really neatly with a sign language of some sort.*

I'm not trying to say that this is exactly what you have to do, I'm just trying to give you another dimension to work with in order to make a richer, more expressive language. If you only want them to communicate in light, then by all means, go for it. Another thing you could do is check out Morse Code (using a timed system of flashes, akin to how long and short vowels change the meaning of a word.)

*I just thought of this: check out Tinkerbell in Disney's Peter Pan. Since she can't communicate vocally, she uses her light and motions to communicate herself to Peter and the others. In this particular case, her emotions are conveyed through light while she mimes what she's trying to say, so it's not exactly a full language, but still, she's using light and motion to convey her thoughts.