[809] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: additions to Klingon? (color terms)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue May 11 10:33:09 1993
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Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: mark <mark@dragonsys.COM>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Tue, 11 May 93 09:19:07 EST
ghItlh Michael Everson:
>> And Klingon needs a much better range of color words!
>
> Who's to say they see the same colours we do?
For what it's worth, one of the law'qu' ST novels -- sorry, I
can't remember which, I read it law'ben -- tells us that Klingons
don't see colors the same way tera'ngan do. There was something
involving a warning notice on a Starflee ship, displayed in red
on black (?), and a Klingon who violated it; the crux of the
issue was that (as Spock analyzed the situation) he couldn't
distinguish the foreground and background colors from each other.
Maybe that's why TKD uses the same word for 'red' and 'orange':
show a Klingon color chips that an English-speaker would call
red and orange, and he'll see them as the same very deep
near-black, almost infrared to him. OTOH, maybe Klingons really
do have a very small primary color vocabulary; it's well known
among linguists that many human languages do, and that there's a
fairly constant order of colors from most basic to more subtle.
(Oops: "primary color vocabulary" here means color vocabulary
that is at a basic level in the language's lexicon -- e.g., an
elementary word like "brown" rather than a description in terms
of something else, like "dirt color" or "pale green". I'm not
talking about "primary colors".)
OT3H, maybe M.O. was just lazy. ;-)
- marqem
Mark A. Mandel
Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : mark@dragonsys.com
