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