[827] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: additions to Klingon? (color terms)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed May 12 17:32:21 1993
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
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Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common fol
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Wed, 12 May 93 16:05:33 EDT
In-Reply-To: <9305110919.A05845@dragonsys.COM>; from "mark" at May 11, 93 9:19
mark says:
:
: 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. ;-)
If you're interested in color words in tera'ngan Holmey, it's worth checking
out the book _Basic Color Terms_ (I believe that's the title) by Berlin and Kay
(first names escape me). Apparently, of the 2^11 possible subsets of the eleven
basic color terms they consider (white, black, red, yellow, green, blue, brown,
purple, pink, orange, gray) only a few are actually found, as follows (if
memory serves), and they appear to evolve in the numerical order given below
(whether green or yellow is added first seems to be a toss-up, hence two
variants of stage III):
Stage I: black, white
Stage II: black, white, red
Stage IIIa: black, white, red, yellow
Stage IIIb: black, white, red, green
Stage IV: black, white, red, yellow, green
Stage V: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue
Stage VI: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown [maybe brown comes
before blue -- it's been a while since I read the book]
Stage VII: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, any of {purple, pink,
orange, gray}
The book is largely based on a study of native speakers of (I believe) fourteen
languages, and how they delineated color areas when presented with a color
chart. It's fascinating reading; check your local college library!
: - marqem
: Mark A. Mandel
: Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
: 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : mark@dragonsys.com
BTW, any plans to create speech recognition for tlhIngan-Hol? ;>
Later,
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