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Languages of West World

Male language has four forms of voicing rather than the more common two found in WorldZero: voiced, unvoiced, resonant voiced and resonant unvoiced. Men consequently haveshorter words and fewer other distinctions between speech sounds than women. Femalelanguage is more like World Zero language in this respect, since they lack the hyoid cavity.Both sets of language have expressive adequacy except in the realm of colour and relatedvocabulary, where women's language is richer. Female colour terms never have exclusivelymale phonetic or linguistic features. The languages are generally dialects with a considerableoverlap. However, baby language lacks both the colour vocabulary and the extra phonemes.

Male colour vision is based on only two types of cone cells, green and blue, meaning there areonly two additive primary colours and one secondary colour, thus:

Also, to a man the central secondary colour is the brightest, close to white, with the result that

the visual spectrum seems brightest midway between green and blue. Male colour vision isalso anomalous in that rod cells can detect a wider range of frequencies, resulting in red andviolet looking grey rather than colourful. Yellow and indigo are about equally dull. Hencealthough the frequency range of visible light is the same for women and men, the latter cannot see actual colours at either end of the spectrum and the brightest colour, cyan, is alsosomewhat unsaturated. Male colour vocabulary is therefore very impoverished indeed: theonly words they have correspond to black (including red, purple and violet), white (includingcyan), green, blue, yellow-orange and grey. By contrast the female colour vocabulary is as richas that of corresponding languages in World Zero and shows the same implicationaluniversals.

Taking the lingua franca as typical, the differences between female and male colour terms alsospill over into connotations, particularly in female vocabulary. The colour terms themselvesdiffer because in male language, colours are named after objects which are typically of that colour to a male eye, whereas in female language colours have their own names. For example,

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the term for black and red in male language is blood-coloured, but they have their ownwords in female language. Female connotations for colour influence other parts of femalevocabulary, so that words for emotions, for example, correspond to colour terms. They work as follows in female language:

Black : This is usually pejorative, meaning mischievous or evil, but with reference to humanbeings it is positive. Black when referring to human appearance means beautiful, partlybecause humans always have dark skin, the darker the better, with black irises and hair.Paradoxically, it also means ugly when referring to inanimate objects. A black-heartedperson is seen as clean and pure in thought. In male language, black is the colour of blood,giving it extra connotations. The dual of black refers to the daylight hours, that is, a period of brightness separated by two periods of darkness in female language. To a man, thecorresponding phrase would be the two bloods, which makes little sense, but the word thethree bloods refers to a married triad, i.e. one woman and two men in a stable sexualrelationship.

White : May be pejorative as it's associated with dirt and soiling on human skin but also withcleanliness elsewhere. The sunrise and the early morning are referred to as the white lineand the sunset and early evening as the black line. The word for white means ugly whenreferring to human beings, but can also mean old, wise and experienced. The distinctivefive-number system of West World languages also come into play here, as the dual for whitealso means date and day in the sense of a single rotation of the planet. West Worldcultures outside the Arctic Circle judge the day as beginning and ending at noon, and thereforeconsisting of two bright periods separated by two dark ones.

Red : This colour is only perceived separately by females, and in fact, red, orange and yelloware the brightest colours to women but yellow is only a very faint colour to a man and orangeand yellow are completely imperceptible as saturated colours at all to them. As it is associatedwith blood, the trial of red, i.e. the word the three reds is the female equivalent of the malethe three blacks, the word for a married triad. Red is also associated with embarrassment and anger, as women find red such a bright colour that even though humans are dark-skinned,they can detect the flush of anger and the blush of self-consciousness. Men are only aware of this in abstract terms and cannot see it. Hence the female word for red also means angryor shy. Pink is associated with the female too because it can only be seen by women: mensee pink as light grey. The word for pink actually means female, and the words the twopinks and the three pinks refer to lesbian dyads and triads.

Blue : Associated with healing, tranquility, calm and cleanliness by both sexes, but also withblindness and metaphorical blindness. A blind person is described as blue-eyed, which alsohas connotations of ignorance in both neutral and pejorative senses. The male term for blue

translates as sky-coloured. The only blue-eyed people in West World are those withcataracts, who are therefore blind. The word for blue is also the female word for male.Blue-blooded means the same as blackhearted in English, and in male language also meansduplicitous or equivocal because to the male ear the phrase sounds contradictory: black which is blue.

Green : Envy in both sex sociolects there is no concept of jealousy in West World. Also,inexperience, the prime of life, unripeness. A green-souled person is someone who in somesense has failed to grow up. The connotations for green are close for both sexes, and it forms akind of neutral ground. When talking to each other, women and men will tend to use thewords for green more often, and the male phrase, sea-coloured is used because the male

word for sea is pronounceable by women whereas more obvious phrases such as leaf-coloured are not. The range of colours referred to as green is also wider in communicationbetween the sexes than within them.

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Yellow : Age in male language, illness in female, but also sometimes vigour and health. Mensee autumn leaves as yellow, which they cannot distinguish from brown, or black, andtherefore use the term autumnal to refer to yellow with the added connotation of a dyingfall. The female usage refers to liveliness and sunshine. Yellow-eyed means jaundiced towomen but not to men, since they would not be able to distinguish between healthy whites of eyes and yellowed ones.

See also tomatoes.

Number: West World human language most commonly has five numbers by contrast with thetwo of the English language (singular and plural). These are singular (for one item), dual(two), trial (three), paucal (four to six) and plural (six or above). Psychologically, themathematical intuition of the West World mind is slightly more advanced than the humanminds of the other world because it can grasp six items easily in one go and also has a slightlylarger short-term memory capacity. As a result, the likes of telephone numbers in West Worldcan be slightly longer. The reason for this difference appears to be innate social adaptations,namely the need to deal with three-person sexual relationships and the tendency to havelarger intimate social groups. In the dominant West World language, number is expressed bychanging the vowel of the stem of nouns. Personal pronouns are also richer, as there areeighteen first person pronouns depending on inclusivity, number and gender mix. The secondperson has eighteen pronouns and the third person is organised in a way which breaks WorldZero linguistic universals. In fact, West World languages have many of their own universalsand routinely violate those of World Zero.

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Tomatoes.

Tomatoes in West World are identical to those of World Zero, but look different to somehumans there. Here are some pictures indicating how they appear to men there.