[tlhIngan Hol] Out of curiosity..

Jeff Zeitlin jzeitlin at cyburban.com
Fri Feb 22 04:26:19 PST 2019


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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