Three Dollar Quill

I'm poking a little at Impliciula, but not sure whether I'm doing things right, so I'm going to just trundle along at it, not rushing.

So, the other thing I mentioned thinking about.

I've been watching some videos on tetrachromacy, and it inspired me to investigate the vision of natural tetrachromats, specifically birds (and most specifically some hummingbirds, I guess). Judging by the diagrams I'm looking at, which may be somewhat schematic, bird cone cells have more evenly spaced peaks of activation than human cone cells, and possibly narrower ranges of activation? Experimental evidence, (and some extremely simplified toy models I sketched up), supports the hypothesis that these hummingbirds, at least, perceive tetrachromatic colors.

Now, some of the videos I watched concerned efforts to devise color names for the various non-spectral colors that the research featured in those videos are supposed to make possible, but I wondered, if a bird were to devise color terms, and gradually, rather than all at once, what would it look like?

I've just scratched the surface in thinking about this so far, and I definitely need to come at it more systematically, but what I have so far is, I believe it's plausible that the first color term beyond black and white would correspond to red, ultraviolet, the colors in between (a sort of un-blue ultra-magenta), as well as some colors around red, and a broader halo of colors around ultraviolet. My basis for this is that both colors have very significant meanings for birds, and the non-spectral combination appears to be one possible coloration for flower petals.

Because the tetrachromatic hue space has a different structure than trichromatic, I'm not sure how best to divide it up further, or even how to make sure that I'm getting everything. I can consider, for example, the equivalent of the CMYK system, but I'm more interested in the more ad-hoc earlier systems, stuff that relates to the values of a hypothetical bird-people society, rather than "here are the five colors of ink that they need for their printers, when (if) they invent printers".

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Going to sleep, and see if I come up with any more ideas or thoughts on... like, anything.

Good night.