[tlhIngan Hol] Punctuation

[De'vID]

On Tue, 21 May 2019 at 13:11, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:

> Feel free to ignore that list. It says “Klingonists agree,” but I don’t
> remember any kind of referendum.
>

It says "Klingonists have agreed that using commas is a very useful thing
to make phrases clear." While this statement is not sufficiently supported
by evidence on the page itself, are you saying it's untrue? Does anyone
disagree that using commas is useful for making phrases clear?

This is followed by "Over time, Klingonists have generally settled on these
practices on the mailing list and other online places, not as a matter of
policy, but as a convention." The practices listed seem to me to generally
be what is usually followed, here on this mailing list and also elsewhere
when Klingon is written in Latin script as plain-text ASCII. I say
"generally" because there's some variation, e.g., I use <single angle
brackets> instead of the <<double angle brackets>> listed on that page.

Nobody is obliged to follow common practice, but the reason it exists is
because it's what most people do.


> Just use whatever punctuation you think best expresses what you want and
> will be best understood and accepted by your audience.
>

Which will probably end up being very similar to what's listed on that
page. There's a reason that people avoid single and double quotation
characters when writing Klingon (in Latin), it's because they're easily
confused for {qaghwI'}. There's also a reason why asterisks are used for
English words: it's because Okrand uses italics for this purpose, and
historically italics have been indicted by asterisks in ASCII-only mailing
lists. So if you try to develop your own conventions and still want to be
understood, you'll very likely end up re-inventing the same conventions
used by everyone else.

-- 
De'vID
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