mèþru wrote:Plus most kårroť humans are tetrachromats. So how would they perceive colours? And what would be their colour terms? How would they see the things we see? What colour is the sky there? etc.
Adding more base colours quickly explodes the number of colour distinctions that you are able to make. If you are only looking at simple mixtures of two of your base colours, then three bases (B-G-R) will give you three distinct mixes,
When you add a fourth base (let's call it Y for yellow), you'll get one additional binary mixture in the cycle of the bases (B-G-Y-R), but there also appear two distinct mixtures across the cycle that don't exist in the trichromatic system,
In other words, in tetrachromatic colours you can have for example a "blue-yellow" colour that's different from "green". You also get mixtures of three base colours that don't have direct counterparts in the trichromatic system.
More accurately speaking, adding more base colours to the colour vision means that you are dividing the visible spectrum with narrower basis functions,
like these ones here, which are used to mix the rest of the colours. The effect of this is that your vision gives finer information about the spectrum of the incoming light and you are also better able to define colours that consist of narrower spectral areas with gaps in between.
Classifiers will be used in conjunction with numbers for when you have more than three things. I only found one language with both gender and classifiers, Khmu'. If anyone can find a grammar of it or of a language that has both classifiers and gender or case, it would be much appreciated.
I'm not familiar with Khmu, but the Arawakan languages, like
Palikúr or Tariana, quite often have both a masculine-feminine(-neuter) gender system and some selection of rich classifier systems. And much closer to home, several Indic languages, such as Bengali, appear to have small sets of numeral classifiers besides having gender.