[tlhIngan Hol] Out of curiosity..

[nIqolay Q]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 9:20 AM Lieven L. Litaer <levinius at gmx.de> wrote:

>
> Okrand wrote that before the existence of the KLI. He certainly just
> wanted to avoid saying anything wrong so he wrote that nothing is known.
> His job was to describe the language, not the letters.
>

There's apparently a PhD thesis whose author interviewed Okrand, titled
"Klingon as linguistic capital".
http://www.angelfire.com/trek/yensw/PDF/thesis.pdf (I'm sure Lieven knew
about this thesis already, I'm just mentioning it for the group.)

When Okrand was asked about pIqaD: "The mapping is very cleverly done... I
think it is great, it makes it so you can write the language... I wish I
could read it, when I get something written in pIqaD I'm able to very
slowly figure it out... I am glad someone really is doing it and has
decided that it is an alphabet and not a syllabary. Now we know, 'cause
Michael Okuda and I didn't know that."

Perhaps this means that Maltz was simply less forthcoming with orthography
information in the early days of their partnership. (He was probably still
salty over being captured by Kirk.) Or perhaps the Klingon Empire had been
using a more complex writing system at the time that was eventually
replaced by the simpler alphabetic pIqaD, and the distinction between the
variants of pIqaD wasn't obvious to outsiders. There are plenty of ways to
make the canon work in your head, I think. (I'm not sure it needs to be
explained, though. When science fiction tries to come up with in-setting
explanations for things that are clearly just production issues -- like why
all the alien races on Star Trek look like humans with prosthetics -- it
often falls flat.)

On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 9:09 AM Daniel Dadap <daniel at dadap.net> wrote:

> If anything, maybe the use of a font based on KLI pIqaD on-screen in Star
> Trek Discovery makes KLI pIqaD somewhat official, but that’s Star Trek
> official and not Marc Okrand official, since those are two different things.


True, but it seems Star Trek official is a subset of Marc Okrand official.
There are things MO has said that aren't "official" Star Trek canon, like
the details of how gagh is prepared. But for the most part, he seems
willing to accept what Star Trek presents for Klingons and work around the
issues, even if that means pointing to some gibberish from DS9 and saying
it's just an older form of the language. He even takes a similarly
diplomatic approach to stuff that's important to Klingon fans, even if it's
not TV-show official, like some of the words from "The Klingon Art of War",
accepting {mInyoD} from Klingon Hamlet, and the time he translated various
Klingonaase titles used by fans. (And even the words from "The Klingon Art
of War" that he didn't sign off on, he explained away as "well, Maltz says
that might be an archaic term he's not heard before", rather than outright
saying Keith DeCandido screwed up.)

Also, as for using other symbols to represent sounds: There are a few
languages that use the numeral 7 to represent the glottal stop, since it
looks sort of similar to the IPA symbol for a glottal stop (which is kind
of a ? without the dot). {Daj ngutlhvam 7e7 DaQub7a7}
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