[tlhIngan Hol] Out of curiosity..

[Will Martin]

Not to be a spoilsport here, but written Klingon is defined by those who legally own it to be indecipherable and not understood. TKD presents a phonetic alphabet for spoken Klingon. It’s Okrand’s system, not Maltz’s, and since Okrand is the guy who dictates what is or is not the language, that’s the gold standard.

As fans, we can play around with stuff, and I think that’s great. We have a pIqaD alphabet that was not initially approved, and then Skybox came along and now it’s official (I guess). 

So, sure, maybe something else we come up with will end up being used by some official entity, but I haven’t really heard a reason to replace Okrand’s romanized TKD alphabet, and there’s a lot of canon out there using it. Jump to something else and new users would suddenly have to learn two systems.

If there were a compelling reason besides, “wouldn’t it be cool if…”, I could get behind it. I mean, it’s important to keep things interesting, but I’m not sure that the confusion this would probably create would be worth an actual shift.

I’d see it more like the running joke we had for a while that we had when some of us wrote Klingon text backwards as a code (keeping the ligatures internally forward), just to see who could figure out what was being written. It was fun. It was interesting. We didn’t suggest we start writing everything backwards, though. Some human languages go right to left. I work with them.

And at one point, Klingon was supposed to be read/written from the middle outward, but that was just to be weird. Eyes don’t track that pattern very well...

charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan

rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.




> On Feb 22, 2019, at 7:52 AM, Jeffrey Clark <jmclark85 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Since Klingon has fewer letters than than there are characters in most keyboards, it seems needless, if there was going to be a change in the system, to keep any multi-character letters.
> 
> —jevreH
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
>> On Feb 22, 2019, at 07:26, Jeff Zeitlin <jzeitlin at cyburban.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Thu, 21 Feb 2019 15:47:23 -0600, Daniel Dadap <daniel at dadap.net>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>>> On Feb 21, 2019, at 12:13, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> how would we distinguish between the q and Q ?
>>> 
>>> The one other place where case matters is in distinguishing between 
>>> ng+H and n+gh. I don’t think there are any word pairs where the 
>>> difference would cause confusion, but that doesn’t mean there never 
>>> will be.
>>> 
>>> For example, nobody is going to think that NENGHEP is nengHep, or that 
>>> VENGHOM is venghom if they know the words nenghep and vengHom.
>> 
>> Perhaps the Esperanto 'x-convention' could be suitably adopted here,
>> and for the same reason that it is used in Esperanto: 'x' isn't a
>> letter in the alphabet.  Thus, H -> hx and Q -> qx, and your examples
>> become nenghep and venghxom.
>> 
>> (side note: Esperanto has six letters that have diacritics; without
>> the diacritics, they are indistinguishable from six other letters in
>> the Esperanto alphabet. So, if you're using a keyboard that doesn't
>> support the Esperanto diacritics, you use the 'matching'
>> undiacritic-ized letter followed by 'x' to indicate the diacritic-ized
>> letter.)
>> 
>>> Using qh for Q could be problematic in a similar way for 
>>> distinguishing q+H from Q. For example, is baqha' baqHa' or baQa'?
>> 
>> And these are baqhxa' and baqxa' respectively.
>> 
>>> An encoding like xifan hol or a system with diacritics would avoid 
>>> these issues.
>> 
>>> FWIW I found SuStel’s example texts perfectly readable, but it does 
>>> seem that old habits are hard to break (I saw a “DaH” in there rather 
>>> than “Dah”, for example.) Also, I wonder, since qaghwI' can’t exactly 
>>> be capital or lowercase, if the vowel following a qaghwI' in a word 
>>> that begins with qaghwI' should be the one to be capitalized instead. 
>>> For example:
>>> 
>>> Qu' dataghdi' 'Aktu' Mellota' je tikaw.
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