tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu May 19 12:09:44 1994
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Re: tam poHvo'
- From: [email protected] (Nick NICHOLAS)
- Subject: Re: tam poHvo'
- Date: Fri, 20 May 94 13:45:37 EST
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>; from "Marnen Laibow-Koser" at May 18, 94 10:48 am
Hu'tegh! nuq ja' Marnen Laibow-Koser jay'?
=This is a topic that keeps popping up on the list from time to time, so I
=apologize to any longtime subscribers who may remember me saying this some time
=ago. Meanwhile, for those who missed it the first time around, here goes: Check
=out _Basic Color Terms_, by Berlin & Kay (first names keep slipping my mind) --
=it's a fascinating, relatively nontechnical book. Their thesis is that, with
=few exceptions, the color terms in natural Terran languages (bear in mind that
=we don't know if Okrand was trying to duplicate this) follow this progression:
[]
=Klingon, then, would be stage III (since we don't know the whether the focus of
=>SuD< is yellow or green, it's hard to say whether it's IIIa or IIIb).
You did well to wheel this out again.
There is one hitch though. Klingon isn't stage III as we know it. The reason
is that SuD/Doq in human languages distinguish between cold (blue/green)
and warm (red/yellow) colours. The two are never, to my knowledge, confused
or conflated in human language.
In Klingon, yellow is a cold colour.
I would be surprised if this *wasn't* a deliberate trick of Okrand's. If
so, he must have been laughing for the past 9 years: people are all running
around thinking Klingon falls into the Berlin & Kay hierarchy, when it does
no such thing. In fact, this can be taken as evidence that Klingons are
wired differently to humans. But I'd need to read a bit more neurology
to state that categorically.
--
Nick.