tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri May 13 03:45:03 1994

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tam poHvo'

>From: "Kevin A. Geiselman, Knight Errant" <[email protected]>
>Date: Thu, 12 May 1994 17:55:30 -0400 (EDT)


>The Human eye cannot see color in dim light, or it at least has great
>difficulty.  The retina has rods and cones.  The rods see contrast only,
>black and white.  The cones distinguish color and don't work well when the
>light is dim.

>Now, it is fairly well established that Klingons live in the dark, so to
>speak.  The Klingon Homeworld seems in a perpetual state of overcast.  Not
>a whole lot of light coming down so not a whole lot of color to see.  The
>Klingons evolving in this environment would develop vision that saw better
>contrast in dim light.  Klingons are probably fairly color blind.

I don't see how this follows.  The *HUMAN* eye sees contrast better in the
dark and isn't very good at seeing colors.  What on earth has that to do
with how a *Klingon* eye would evolve?  If Klingons did indeed evolve in a
darker environment (I'll take your word on that), and if they wound up
evolving color-vision at all, why isn't it plausible that they would evolve
color-vision that worked better in the dark?

>Also, the lack of a variety of words for colors might be somewhat
>cultural.  I've heard that the Inuit (Eskimos) have dozens of different
>words to describe snow and the various shades of white.  It's because snow
>is important to them.  Modern western culture has dozens of different
>words to describe sex and sexual body parts.  It reflects the importance
>of that in our society. (No, I won't list them)

Don't read too much into what's "important" based on the vocabulary.  Yes,
it's plausible that the rich lexical field of "snow" words in Inuit
languages is useful, since some snow is safe to walk on, sled on, build
with, etc, and some isn't.  But many languages have rich lexical fields
just because... well, just because they do.  I dounbt you can prove that
Russians consider moving any more important or useful than Frenchmen, but
Russian is absolutely packed with a gazillion different words for fine
nuances of motion.  Finnish has mounds of verbs expressing sufficiency, "to
be able to overcome one's innate laziness enough to...", "to have enough
energy to..." "to withstand cold enough to...."  Is this area somehow more
important to Finns than to Spaniards?

>A sort of concurrent point: Klingon doesn't seem to have a word for
>breast.  Now, this might be because the dictionary is not complete, it
>admits that, in fact.  Or it could be that, unlike humans that have a
>score of different words to describe that part of the female anatomy,
>Klingons just don't think breasts are particularly important.

Don't make the mistake of taking TKD as complete; nobody ever said it was.
You can't say *Klingon* has no word for "breast"; all you can say is that
*we* have no word for "breast" in Klingon.  Taking the "natural" view of
Klingon, maybe Maltz just never got around to that one.  He also didn't
tell us the word for "metatarsal" or "hip", yet so far as we can tell
Klingons have them.  You can't expect *all* the words in a purportedly
natural language in a small book like TKD!

>So, that should give you some ideas why Klingons is so lacking in color
>names: Klingons are color blind, colors aren't important, they might see
>into areas of the spectrum that Human eyes cannot see, so tyring to
>describe the color in Federation Standard would be useless (like having a
>bat or dolphin describe how sonar looks; 'It sounds green.')

Or maybe their language just isn't big on color.  Much is made about Terran
languages with more or fewer color-words than others, but I don't think
there's any evidence that native speakers of these languages are better or
worse at seeing colors.  Most normal Americans I know are perfectly capable
of distinguishing between the blue of the sky and the dark blue of the
British or American flag, even though they're both blue, and even though an
Israeli would be likely to call one "t'chelet" and the other "kachol".

>Or maybe they are just asthetically challenged.

>-------------------------------------------------------------------------

>Kordite, Chief of Intelligence, IKV Dark Justice, Klingon Assault Group

~mark

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