Reminiscences of the motivation of words (especially
onomatopoeic qualities, i.e., phonetic resemblance to what the
word refers to, such as crack or whoosh) do not really affect the
abstract rules of generating statements, or even our
understanding of such language signs.
Images are more constrained, more directly determined by the
pragmatic experience in whose framework they are generated. Red
as a word (with its equivalencies in other languages: rot in
German, rouge in French, rojo in Spanish,
in Japanese, adom in Hebrew, and
in Russian) is arbitrary in comparison to the color it
designates. Even the designation is quite approximate. In given
experiential situations, many nuances can be distinguished,
although there are no names for them. The red in an image is a
physical quality that can be measured and standardized, hence
made easier to process in photography, printing, and synthesis of
pigments. In the same experiential framework, it can be
associated with many objects or processes: flowers, blood, a
stoplight, sunset, a flag. It can be compared to them, it can
trigger new associations, or become a convention. Once language
translates a visual sign, it also loads it with conventions
characteristic of language-red as in revolution, cardinal red,
redneck, etc.-moving it from the realm of its physical
determination (wavelength, or frequency of oscillation) to the
reality of cultural conventions.
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