tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 24 03:56:46 1994
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Colors
- From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Colors
- Date: Wed, 24 Aug 94 15:52:07 EDT
This morning as I looked in the mirror, inserting contact
lenses, I remembered that Humans call my eye color hazel. For
those not especially familiar with this "color" it is the color
of a red-brown nut, a red-brown wood or green-brown eyes. That
is not to say greenish-brown. Hazel eyes have mixed patches of
green and brown.
In my case, my eyes look like black stars with brown caronas on
a circular field of progressively dark green. English sums that
up as "hazel". (sigh)
Anyway, hazel and calico are grammatically used as if they were
pure colors instead of mixes of colors. See where I'm headed?
Suppose, when they asked Maltz for words for colors, he started
listing off the 13,000 official Klingon color words that every
school puq learns in kindergarden, in their order on the
spectrum from infra-red to ultra-violet, just like he was
taught when he was young.
The researchers stop him and request that he choose a smaller
set of colors. Smaller set? Impossible! You want colors? Here
are 13,000! So the researchers step back and consult each
other, then they approach him again and, this time, they say,
"Give me the smallest number of colors you can think of that
when you add them together makes white." So Maltz gave the two
combinations of colors that he knows can do that. They are the
equivalent of hazel and calico in that they are words referring
to sets of colors combined in a region or on an object. Maybe
they are the colors found on Klingon flowers or somesuch.
Then again, maybe they pointed to a flower's parts and asked
what color they were and he told them the word-equivalent to
"calico", and continued to do so for every color on the flower.
Then again, maybe he got fed up and provided himself with the
same sort of entertainment suggested at qep'a', that when a
tera'ngan asks you how to say, "Have a nice day," you tell
them, "DaH HIHoH!" so he will go off and say that to the next
Klingon he meets.
charghwI'