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@lists.kli.org> on behalf of Lieven L. Litaer <levinius@gmx.de> Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2020 12:00 To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org; tlhingan-hol@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 _______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org