Thehuman eye can physically perceive(感知) millions of colours. But we don't all r-组卷网

阅读理解-阅读单选 0.65 引用1 组卷114

The human eye can physically perceive(感知) millions of colours. But we don't all recognise these colours in the same way.

Colour perception is less about seeing what is actually out there and more about how our brain interprets colours to create something meaningful. The perception of colour mainly occurs inside our heads and is closely related to personal experience.

Different languages and cultural groups carve up the colour spectrum differently. Some languages like Dani, spoken in Papua New Guinea, and Bassa,spoken in Liberia, only have two terms, dark and light. Dark roughly translates as cool in those languages, and light as warm. So colours like black, blue, and green are cool colours, while lighter colours like white, red, orange and yellow are warm colours.

Remarkably , most of the world's languages have five basic colour terms. Cultures as diverse as the Himba in the Namibian plains and the Berinmo in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea employ such five term systems. As well as dark, light, and red, these languages have a term for yellow, and a term that represents both blue and green. That is, these languages do not have separate terms for “green” and “blue” but use one term to describe both colours, a sort of “grue”.

Historically, Welsh had a “grue” term, namely “glas”, as did Japanese and Chinese. Nowadays, in all these languages, the original “grue” term has been restricted to blue, and a separate green term is used. This is either developed from within the language—as is the case for Japanese—or through lexical borrowing, as is the case for Welsh.

The way we perceive colours can also change during our lifetime. Greek speakers_,who have two fundamental colour terms to describe light and dark blue (“ghalazio” and “ble”)，tend to see these two colours as more similar after living for long periods of time in the UK. There, these two colours are described in English by the same fundamental colour term: blue.

This is because after long term everyday exposure to an English-speaking environment, the brain of native Greek speakers starts interpreting the colours “ghalazio” and “ble” as part of the same colour category.

【小题1】Which of the following can be best used to describe colour perception?