[230] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Colors?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Fri Mar 13 17:43:25 1992
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Richard Kennaway CMP RA <jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 92 07:38:31 GMT
> Well, it's very interesting. From the dictionary, it appears that there
> only two words for color: Doq (red or orange) and SuD (blue, green, or
> yellow). From this, we might surmise that Klingons are blue-yellow
> color blind. Things appear to be either reddish or bluish to them.
Not necessarily. There are human languages with only two colour words,
but their speakers are as capable of distinguishing colours as the rest
of humanity. If they need to name them, they would use words like
"dark", "pale", etc. or concrete images, just as we do in English if we
need to make finer distinctions. For example, Russian has completely
different words for light blue and dark blue - that doesnt mean that
Russians have greater acuity in distinguishing them.
Of course, there's no reason Klingon colour vision should be the same
as humans'. They might indeed distinguish fewer colours, or see a
different part of the spectrum (what's the spectrum of the Klingon
sun?). But they may well be able to distinguish more than two.
I still don't have a dictionary, so I'll leave it to others to decide
what images might be standard Klingon usage in making finer distinctions.
--
Richard Kennaway SYS, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.
Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk
