[tlhIngan Hol] Out of curiosity..

[Lieven L. Litaer]

Am 22.02.2019 um 15:01 schrieb Daniel Dadap:
> The operative part being “if there was going to be a change in this system”. Klingon orthography reform has been proposed countless times,

Just for anyone interested, there's apage on that in the Klingon wiki:
http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/OrthographicReform

  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.

Yes, the problem its that we're used to it, and we've been using it for 
so long. Theoreteically, if this would be changed, all newcomers would 
be confused as hell, not knowing which ressources to use. There could be 
a "reformed print" of Hamlet and so on, but that will quickly stop at 
things like the Monopoly or the subtitles on Netflix. The language 
community s not as larger as esperanto (or any natural language) where 
there are millions of speakers and students who will work or discuss on 
the reformation progress. All just theoretically spoken.

I can certainly live with the okrandian spelling, but I think it destroy 
a little bit the credibility of the Klingon language, because for 
outsiders, it quickly looks like nonsense.

"Zurkliop emgrk koserkt" look more natural than "eM'el Rok purgWvft"

> * Case sensitivity: it’s one thing that letters like D and S are capitalized all the time; 

That would be easy to replace, as it doesnt change anything.

> * 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.

That's amajor problem.

> * qaghwI': using a punctuation mark as a letter is problematic for many inferior Terran information systems.

Not only punctuation marks, especially the apostrophe is used even more 
often than others. Doing Klingon localisations often need "escaping" the 
apostrophe, which is relaly annoying. In Excel, you cannot start a cell 
with an apostrophe.

In Navi, a similar sound to this is written as an x.

> * I and l: these Ietters Iook slmlIar or somtlmes ldentlcaI ln Iots of lnferlor Iatln scrlpt fonts.

I'd love to replace that, for just this reason.

> * 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.

I certainly would not use the x for that sound, but also not for H.

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As abottom line I'd like to add that I know we cannot change the system. 
I'm just talking about this theoretically.

Lieven.

-- 
Lieven L. Litaer
aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany"
http://www.klingonisch.de
http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/OrthographicReform