tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 17 23:39:14 1994
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Re: color: SuD
According to R.B Franklin:
>
> Does anyone know specifically why the word {SuD} means blue, green and
> yellow?
This will always be speculative, unless Okrand comes out and
explains why he did this. Given other patterns in the language,
my own suspicion is that Okrand was seeking to be alien to
English. As a linguist exposed to many languages, Okrand knows
full well that different languages split up the spectrum at
different resolutions. People at Crayola have probably done
more to affect the commonly named colors in English than anyone
else. He threw in a couple words for color and in doing so he
grouped colors together that humans would not usually consider
to be members of the same group. I'm sure that was no accident,
and I doubt he intended to define Klingon physiology of vision.
> Does this mean:
> 1. Klingons have tritanopic color-blindness (unable to distinguish
> between blue and yellow);
This is possible, but far from certain.
> 2. Klingons are unable to discern the upper-end of the "visual" spectrum
> (unable to perceive the band of shorter wave-length light in the
> spectrum humans perceive. Note: there is also no word for violet or purple
> listed, which may support this theory); or
This is possible, though completely contrary to novels which
suggest that Klingons see well into ultraviolet, beyond human
visual range.
> 3. Klingons can see these colors perfectly well but the distiction is
> simply unimportant.
Possible as well, though in this case it may be that one
Klingon in particular, Maltz, may be alone or nearly alone in
his lack of interest or perception of colors. Imagine if the
only human to teach Federation Standard to Klingons were
red-green color blind. Would he teach Klingons the words "red"
and "green", and if he tried, would he do so accurately? What
would Klingons conclude about what color words meant if they
pointed to something red and asked the human to give them the
word for that color? We have only Maltz, and he provided us
only with these words.
> yoDtargh
charghwI'