[tlhIngan Hol] why we shouldn't do transcriptions

SuStel sustel at trimboli.name
Thu Feb 27 07:35:26 PST 2020


On 2/27/2020 10:25 AM, mayqel qunen'oS wrote:
> SuStel:
> > They do show why Klingon so
> > desperately needs "spelling reform" that
> > will never happen
>
> What is spelling reform ? Do you mean, transliteration rules ?

I put the term in quotations because it's not exactly an accurate 
description.

Spelling reform is when people try to get everyone to agree to spell 
words differently. For instance, Noah Webster famously caused a lot of 
American spellings to change from British spellings, including changing 
/flavour/ and /colour/ to /flavor/ and /color,/ and changing many 
instances of the suffix /-ise/ to /-ize./

The Klingon writing system we get from TKD isn't spelling, per se, but 
transcription of spoken Klingon. It's not meant to represent actual 
Klingon writing; it's just a one-for-one representation of the phonemes 
of Klingon.

By "spelling reform," I mean that the fixed case of the transcription 
system makes it impossible to capitalize. If writing in the 
transcription system didn't involve letter cases, we could capitalize as 
we do in English, and so mark proper nouns.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

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