ghItlhpu' SuStel, jatlh:

How a language divides up its color words has little to do with whether they can visually perceive those colors. There are real human languages that have the same number of color words as Klingons, but speakers of these languages don't lack our color vision. It's canonically speculated that Klingons can't see all of purple that we do, but otherwise their vision seems to be similar to ours.

To be fair, we don't actually know this canonically. All we know is that the Klingon visual range extends from (at least) what we call red, to somewhere in what we call blue. How many types of retinal chromatic pigments they have to signal those colours is completely unknown. (poD vay') taH:

When a Klingon points at a yellow plant and says SuD, then points at the green sky and says SuD, it's not that they appear to be the same color to him.

Again, I don't think we can fairly say that with any confidence. We just don't know one way or the other. I suspect there may be circumstantial evidence suggesting that Klingons may only have two retinal pigments, making them functional dichromats, but whether that's the case depends on how systematic the use of the SuD-Doq and the Hurgh-wov axes is in selecting a spot in the colour space (or, if they're dichromats, on the colour surface). I pondered this on Facebook a little while ago - here's a link to the comment thread if anyone's interested: https://bit.ly/2jUGn0q - but of course my pondering also remains speculative without further clarification from Maltz. QeS 'utlh

The Land theory you describe is an interesting sidebar in the history of our understanding of colour vision, but it simply doesn't match with what we've subsequently discovered using methods of genetics, embryology, histology, and anatomy that are available now but weren't when Land was doing his research. jatlhpu' charghwI':

He then experimented and discovered that if any one of the three filters was removed, so that that projector showed the black and white picture without its filter... then the full spectrum of color still showed in the projected image."

Of course it does. That's because white light is fundamentally emitting at a wide range of wavelengths, which has been well-known ever since Newton and his prisms. Land's finding makes perfect sense: the filtered light from the other two projectors supplies all the necessary light of those colours, whereas the white light, which is multi-frequency (provable with a prism) and therefore providing light at "all three" colours of the filters, will always supply whichever of the three colours is missing. Taking the red filter off a white light doesn't "take away" the red light, it only masks it by adding the other two colours back into the mix. taH:

But if you instead simply break up our retina sensors into the two types we actually find there, rods and cones, then have one create a low frequency image while the other creates a high frequency image and compare and contrast the two images to mentally invent the colors that we see..."

The problem there is that we know from anatomy and histology of the retina that the rods and the cones are not equally spread across the whole area, which means that under Land's theory we should see better in (say) the red wavelengths in the centre of vision, and the blue wavelengths in the peripheral vision. But that isn't at all what happens. The cones are concentrated in the macula of the retina, which is where our central vision is focused, giving us excellent colour vision (of all colours) in the centre of vision. The rods, though, are spread out at the periphery, giving poor colour vision (which has been demonstrated by numerous experiments with colour perception in peripheral vision) but excellent perception in less intense light (which is also why the most distant stars are often only visible if you don't look directly at them). taH:

But, dominant theories don’t die easily, even when they have no basis in reality, so we still teach that there are three kinds of color cones in the eye, despite the lack of any physical evidence to that effect"

But we have extensive physical evidence. We've sequenced the genes that code for the opsins, the photosensitive proteins, that are expressed in the three different cone types (humans have nine opsin genes altogether, of which three are expressed in cone cells), and we have embryogenic evidence showing that cones never express all three opsins at the same time. Link to a study of macaque retinae showing this: https://bit.ly/2lWfQ3z taH:

nor any explanation why three types of cones would become confused between red and green more often than between blue and green or red and blue

The explanation of that one is very simple indeed: the gene for the opsin with peak sensitivity to green light (i.e. the medium-wavelength opsin) isn't autosomal, but is located on the X chromosome. As such, it requires only a single-gene knockout for men to be affected (though the more usual double knockout for women to be affected). And this is what's seen in population studies: about 8% of men of European ancestry are red/green colour-blind, whereas only about 0.4% of women of the same ancestry are, which matches quite nicely with an X-linked recessive genetic phenomenon. And we've drifted a long way from Klingon here, so I'll cut my response there. Suffice it to say that human vision is far better understood than you give it credit for, and we know just about as certainly as it's possible to know that a three-peak receptive system is necessary to explain the facts of human vision. Klingon anatomy and histology, on the other hand, we just don't know much about, but a simpler two-peak receptive system could also explain the colour terminology attested in canon. QeS 'utlh [https://ipmcdn.avast.com/images/icons/icon-envelope-tick-round-orange-animated-no-repeat-v1.gif]<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> Virus-free. www.avast.com<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail>

If I remember correctly, someone wrote an article about this in HolQeD a couple decades ago. The online index shows: colors: 8:1/7; and Klingon physiology, 5:2/7-9. To make a long story short, there's a theory called the Berlin-Kay color hierarchy. It argues that the number of basic colors terms in a language predicts which colors get named. For example, if a language has only two color terms, they'll be black and white. If it has three color terms, the third term will be red. If it has four terms, the fourth term will be EITHER green or yellow, and if it has a fifth term, it will be the other of the two. The conclusion is that languages have to name colors in a way that fits human color perception, hence the hierarchy. Klingon breaks this pattern by having one word for BOTH green and yellow. The HolQeD article argued that this was a deliberate choice by MO to make the Klingon language more alien. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Universality_and_Evol... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_deb... bI'reng On Sun, Sep 1, 2019 at 4:08 PM SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:

On 9/1/2019 3:12 PM, Michael Kúnin wrote:

Otherwise, if Klingons are bichromatic, then they would see any non-greyscale colour as either a variety of {Doq} or a variety of {SuD}, so it is not much possible to use colour as a defining attribute of an object. No wonder they are irritated by other species making distinctions where they see none!

I wonder if there is a Klingon word meaning "be grey".

How a language divides up its color words has little to do with whether they can visually perceive those colors. There are real human languages that have the same number of color words as Klingons, but speakers of these languages don't lack our color vision. It's canonically speculated that Klingons can't see all of purple that we do, but otherwise their vision seems to be similar to ours.

In English we have a basic color term *pink,* which is considered a different color than red. But in English when we look at blue jeans, then we look at the sky, we call both of them *blue.* (*Cyan* is not a basic color term; it's comparing the color to something else.) But in Russian, for example, they use two unrelated words for the two colors. A Russian might incorrectly think that an English speaker who points to blue jeans then points to the sky and says *blue* for both of them cannot see the distinct colors. But we would not point at a cherry blossom and say *red, *even though pink is a shade of red.

When a Klingon points at a yellow plant and says *SuD,* then points at the green sky and says *SuD,* it's not that they appear to be the same color to him. It's no different than us calling jeans and the sky *blue.* Different shades of color grouped under one name.

In Klingon, *be gray* is *qIj 'ej wov* or *qIj 'ach wov** (TalkNow). *Gray is a shade of black.

-- SuStelhttp://trimboli.name

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Urgh, apologies - I accidentally the send button. Let me try once more. The Klingon system really doesn't break the Berlin-Kay pattern, though. If a language only has terms for "white", "black", "red" and "yellow", that doesn't mean that they can't name any colours that don't fall into what an English speaker would consider those colours to be. It just means that further modifiers are necessary, and often also that the definitions are broader - like in those languages that lack a distinction between "blue" and "green". When such a distinction is absent, that doesn't mean one of those colours doesn't have a name: it means that both "blue" and "green" fall under the same term. What's more, subsequent work has shown that the Berlin-Kay hierarchy isn't universal; it only describes a tendency. Ubykh, for instance, has basic terms for white, black, red, yellow, and blue/green in what is otherwise a fairly straightforward Level IV system, but it also has a term for grey, which breaks across several levels to Level VII of the Berlin-Kay model. Dan Everett's work on Pirahã suggests that language may lack truly basic colour terms entirely. What this means is that for Klingon, we're seeing basically a simple Level III system in the Berlin-Kay model. For Klingons, the nucleus of SuD appears to lie in the green, as shown by KGT p.82, which notes that this is the colour described by the intensified form SuDqu' or "very SuD". If SuD were to be subsequently narrowed to only green, so that a separate term for yellow could be introduced, we'd see a simple level IV system. QeS 'utlh

On Tue, Sep 3, 2019 at 2:15 PM Rhona Fenwick <qeslagh@hotmail.com> wrote:

That doesn't break the Berlin-Kay pattern though. If a language only has terms for "white", "black", "red" and "yellow", that doesn't mean that they can't name any colours that don't fall into what an English speaker would consider those colours to be. It just means that the definitions are broader - like in those languages that lack a distinction between "blue" and "green". When such a distinction is absent, that doesn't mean one of those colours doesn't have a name: it means that both "blue" and "green" fall under the same term.

The question is where languages draw borders between colors. The HolQeD article I dimly remember argued that grouping yellow with green/blue is so odd it's almost alien and speculated that MO knew about the Berlin-Kay hierarchy, and had it mind when he made up the word *SuD* in 1984. On Tue, Sep 3, 2019 at 5:09 PM Will Martin <willmartin2@mac.com> wrote:

My memory of the thing Okrand did intentionally was that according to Berlin-Kay, yellow tends to either have it’s own word, or it is grouped with red and orange.

That's it! That's what I was trying to remember. On Tue, Sep 3, 2019 at 5:09 PM Will Martin <willmartin2@mac.com> wrote:

The Klingon system groups it with blue and green, which makes sense if you look at a spectrum and see that it is arbitrary whether it is grouped with red/orange or green/blue, but languages generally tend to group it with red/orange.

There is no technical reason why human languages group yellow with red and orange. They just do.

I think there is a technical reason based on human color perception, but I don't know enough about that to defend the argument. But I will make one argument:t he fact that so many of the world's languages seem to fit Berlin-Kay suggests that where languages draw borders between colors is *not* arbitrary. When a 90% majority of humans (or human languages) independently make the same decision, it's probably not arbitrary. On Tue, Sep 3, 2019 at 2:15 PM Rhona Fenwick <qeslagh@hotmail.com> wrote:

What's more, subsequent work has shown that the Berlin-Kay hierarchy isn't universal; it only describes a tendency. Ubykh, for instance, has basic terms for white, black, red, yellow, and blue/green, but also has a term for grey, which breaks across several levels of the Berlin-Kay model.

I understand that in linguistics "universals" are statistical tendencies and not absolutes. I also understand that there are ongoing debates about color terminology and that Berlin-Kay is in no way the last word. That said, while Ubykh breaks the Berlin-Kay model, it doesn't contradict the HolQeD article's argument that grouping yellow with green/blue is weird and that MO had Berlin-Kay in mind when he made that choice. bI'reng