On 7/13/2012 5:53 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
The difference between names and numbers is that numbers can only be augmented in a linear fashion, ie by adding instances of whatever arbitrary number of initial digits you name. With names, you can keep adding names at the primordial level. You don't have to start with red and blue and then define everything in terms of red, blue, red*blue, red-blue, or red+blue. You can have yellow. This is how half of the universe works - the half that sees an outside world generated by the other half.
An interesting example. The reason you can add colors out of sequence is that the spectrum is a continuum; so between any two colors is another, different color. This actually happened in the case of "orange". In the time of Chaucer there was no word for "orange", it was just "the color between red and yellow". The name for the color came from the fruit when it was later imported from the orient. Consequently all the european languages have almost the same word for this color.
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