[tlhIngan Hol] Out of curiosity..

[Daniel Dadap]

> On Feb 22, 2019, at 06:52, 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.

The operative part being “if there was going to be a change in this system”. Klingon orthography reform has been proposed countless times, and perhaps a phase of “this spelling system is terrible, why don’t we do this instead!” is something of an initiation ritual for the new Klingonist (ngutlhghep, perhaps?).

The reality though is that as problematic as the system may be, it’s the one we’ve had for 35 years, and all useful materials on the language utilize it. Unless it’s Okrandian transliteration or KLI pIqaD, you won’t find any level of agreement over an alternate spelling convention - even xifan hol could go a couple of different ways (nukneh quzvax vs. nuqneh kuzvax). Sure, you could probably come up with a system that most if not almost all people would be able to read without trouble, but there is a lot of inertia in the existing orthography.

(I know that jevreH and probably most on the list know all this already.)

This isn’t to say that we should stop thinking of ways that work better for us as individuals to transcribe the sounds of the language, just don’t expect that others will accept an alternate system. I personally like xifan hol because it’s fairly efficient, but things like f -> ng are admittedly a bit weird.

But like jevreH said, if we were ever to be granted the opportunity to reform the orthography, I would hope all the major pain points could be remedied:

* Case sensitivity: it’s one thing that letters like D and S are capitalized all the time; it’s another that if a text is transformed to all uppercase or all lowercase the distinctions between q/Q and ngh/ngH get lost.
* qaghwI': using a punctuation mark as a letter is problematic for many inferior Terran information systems.
* I and l: these Ietters Iook slmlIar or somtlmes ldentlcaI ln Iots of lnferlor Iatln scrlpt fonts.
* Multi-character letters: I don’t mind these so much, but words like tlhutlhqangchu'ghach use up more space than they probably need to. However, the other extreme of xifan hol’s rendition of this as xuxkafcuzgac isn’t exactly as intuitively legible to a beginner.