[tlhIngan Hol] If pIqaD became Ca'Non..

[Felix Malmenbeck]

The information that pIqaD was regarded as so mysterious in TKD, and was described as being particularly adapted to describing Klingon dialectal differences suggests that the pIqaD we know may not be the "full" pIqaD.

I wonder if the specific pIqaD letters we use might actually be a simplified phonetic system; the equivalent to Hangeul in Korean, or kana in Japanese. That would allow us to regard the pIqaD we know as "real", while still leaving the door open for more.

> There *is* need for *everything* else (colons,
> semicolons, etc..) I don't think that all natural languages are
> written with the punctuation we know, just because someone centuries
> ago woke up in the morning, and got sexually aroused by the idea of
> creating the punctuation we know today.

Language follows complicated paths, and punctuation has and continues to exist on a spectrum. Chinese writing was fine with no punctuation for millennia, then some inconsistent use of a full stop and a half stop for a few centuries, before adopting more punctuation in recent years.
Thai and Devanagari have considerably fewer punctuation marks than English, and my understanding is that they are mostly optional.

There may be more punctuation in pIqaD, but if so, I hope it isn't too similar to any language we know here on Earth; that'd be terribly uninteresting.

//loghaD

________________________________________
From: tlhIngan-Hol <tlhingan-hol-bounces at lists.kli.org> on behalf of Lieven L. Litaer <levinius at gmx.de>
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2020 12:00
To: tlhingan-hol at kli.org; tlhingan-hol at lists.kli.org
Subject: Re: [tlhIngan Hol] If pIqaD became Ca'Non..

Am 30.04.2020 um 11:15 schrieb Andrew Mac:
> It would be great to be able to visualize how a dictionary used by the
> Klingons would be alphabetized. I wonder what the alphabetical order is
> in Klingon. I like the request for Klingon alphabetical order at the
> chabal page, and don’t understand why so many people are downvoting it.

I guess because that's not something useful to have. I mean, what would
it change? What's the purpose of having that?

Next, we live in a world of parallel universes regarding the Klingon
writing system, and they overlap.
- TKD says "we know nothing about the writing system, and we use the
English alphabetical order for convenience".
- KLI says "here's a suggestion" and everybody uses it, but it's not canon
- DSC uses those same letters, making them Star Trek canon.
- nitpickers say that those letters are never canonically explained, so
they could mean anything.

So depending on what game we play, reading Klingon is "very hard"
(Scotty, ST4) or it's a simply sound-to-character mapping.

Where I'm pointing to is that I believe that Okrand intentionally keeps
avoiding saying anything about the alphabet, because he first wrote in
TKD that we do not know about it. Of course, he "accepts" what we are
using, but that does not make it canon. If he would provide a Klingon
alphabetical order, he would have to either base it on our used KLI
pIqaD (thus making it "okrandian" canon), or he would need to make up
something entirely different — and that could be anything (and knowing
him, it would be something very irregularly complicated).

--
Lieven L. Litaer
aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany"
http://www.tlhInganHol.com
http://klingon.wiki/En/PIqaD
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