Often we talk about "what if.." one day it was allowed to write klingon using lower case. Some would like that, and others not. Out of curiosity though.. if we *did* write in lower case, how would we distinguish between the q and Q ? ~ gho'at qIj
Doesn’t Xifan Hol already do this with k and q? Sent from my iPhone
On Feb 21, 2019, at 13:13, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
Often we talk about "what if.." one day it was allowed to write klingon using lower case.
Some would like that, and others not.
Out of curiosity though.. if we *did* write in lower case, how would we distinguish between the q and Q ?
~ gho'at qIj
_______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
On 2/21/2019 1:13 PM, mayqel qunen'oS wrote:
Often we talk about "what if.." one day it was allowed to write klingon using lower case.
Some would like that, and others not.
Out of curiosity though.. if we *did* write in lower case, how would we distinguish between the q and Q ?
You'd have to make a choice. Since *q* sounds much more like a /k/ than *Q* does, I'd turn *q* into /k/ and leave *Q* alone. /Vaj toddujdaj ngehbej Divi'. Nimbus wej wighos; he yinab! Reh Divi' duj visuv vineh./ /Dopdak kul yichenmoh qobdi' ghu'. Reh suvrup suvwi''a'. Hagh kohpu' neh heghtahvis suvwi'pu'. Hivka' veklargh./ /Qo'nosdak paw cha' Divi' bek. Tlhingan 'avwi' lughom. Lutlhob, nadevvo' Vas'a'dak majahlah'a'? Jang 'avwi', lichopbe'chugh ghewmey./ /Tlh: Nukneh?// //H: Javmah tat chu'wi' vinehbej.// //Tlh: Vaghsad deq hinob! Dah yidil!// //H: Kay'be'. Titlhap!// //Tlh: Maj. Ha'! DaH matlhutlh./ /H: Jabwi', Romulus hik vitlhutlh.// //Tlh: Jabwi', cha' hivje' tikem! Tera'ngan motlhbe' soh.// //H: 'iwlij jachjaj. Tlh: Reh hivje'lijdak 'iwghargh datu'jaj./ Personally, I find this very appealing. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
On 2/21/2019 2:30 PM, SuStel wrote:
On 2/21/2019 1:13 PM, mayqel qunen'oS wrote:
Often we talk about "what if.." one day it was allowed to write klingon using lower case.
Some would like that, and others not.
Out of curiosity though.. if we *did* write in lower case, how would we distinguish between the q and Q ?
You'd have to make a choice. Since *q* sounds much more like a /k/ than *Q* does, I'd turn *q* into /k/ and leave *Q* alone.
Another possibility (not even counting the use of diacritics) would be to do with *Q* what Klingon does with *gh, tlh, *and *ch:* add an /h/ after the /q./ That way, you're not tempted to make the *q* sound like a /k./ /Vaj toddujdaj ngehbej Divi'. Nimbus wej wighos; he yinab! Reh Divi' duj visuv vineh./ /Dopdaq qul yichenmoh qhobdi' ghu'. Reh suvrup suvwi''a'. Hagh qohpu' neh heghtahvis suvwi'pu'. Hivqa' veqlargh./ /Qho'nosdaq paw cha' Divi' beq. Tlhingan 'avwi' lughom. Lutlhob, nadevvo' Vas'a'daq majahlah'a'? Jang 'avwi', lichopbe'chugh ghewmey./ /Tlh: Nuqneh?// //H: Javmah tat chu'wi' vinehbej.// //Tlh: Vaghsad deqh hinob! Dah yidil!// //H: Qay'be'. Titlhap!// //Tlh: Maj. Ha'! Dah matlhutlh./ /H: Jabwi', Romulus hiq vitlhutlh.// //Tlh: Jabwi', cha' hivje' tiqem! Tera'ngan motlhbe' soh.// //H: 'iwlij jachjaj. Tlh: Reh hivje'lijdaq 'iwghargh datu'jaj./ -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
On 2/21/2019 2:49 PM, mayqel qunenoS wrote:
SuStel:
Another possibility (not even counting the use of diacritics)
What do you mean by "the use of diacritics" ?
/č/ for *ch,* /ĝ/ for *gh,* stuff like that. Characters with special marks that are hard to type unless you've got a keyboard dedicated to do it. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
On 2/21/2019 2:56 PM, mayqel qunenoS wrote:
Has anyone so far proposed any diacritics for q and Q ?
I'm sure someone has at some point. My local fonts don't have much for those letters so I won't propose one because I can't easily type it. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
On Feb 21, 2019, at 12:13, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
how would we distinguish between the q and Q ?
The one other place where case matters is in distinguishing between ng+H and n+gh. I don’t think there are any word pairs where the difference would cause confusion, but that doesn’t mean there never will be. For example, nobody is going to think that NENGHEP is nengHep, or that VENGHOM is venghom if they know the words nenghep and vengHom. Using qh for Q could be problematic in a similar way for distinguishing q+H from Q. For example, is baqha' baqHa' or baQa'? An encoding like xifan hol or a system with diacritics would avoid these issues. FWIW I found SuStel’s example texts perfectly readable, but it does seem that old habits are hard to break (I saw a “DaH” in there rather than “Dah”, for example.) Also, I wonder, since qaghwI' can’t exactly be capital or lowercase, if the vowel following a qaghwI' in a word that begins with qaghwI' should be the one to be capitalized instead. For example: Qu' dataghdi' 'Aktu' Mellota' je tikaw.
Wouldn't X work for H? As a mnemonic, think of Greek Chi. Or J, (pronounced as in Spanish) On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 9:47 PM Daniel Dadap <daniel@dadap.net> wrote:
On Feb 21, 2019, at 12:13, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
how would we distinguish between the q and Q ?
The one other place where case matters is in distinguishing between ng+H and n+gh. I don’t think there are any word pairs where the difference would cause confusion, but that doesn’t mean there never will be.
For example, nobody is going to think that NENGHEP is nengHep, or that VENGHOM is venghom if they know the words nenghep and vengHom.
Using qh for Q could be problematic in a similar way for distinguishing q+H from Q. For example, is baqha' baqHa' or baQa'?
An encoding like xifan hol or a system with diacritics would avoid these issues.
FWIW I found SuStel’s example texts perfectly readable, but it does seem that old habits are hard to break (I saw a “DaH” in there rather than “Dah”, for example.) Also, I wonder, since qaghwI' can’t exactly be capital or lowercase, if the vowel following a qaghwI' in a word that begins with qaghwI' should be the one to be capitalized instead. For example:
Qu' dataghdi' 'Aktu' Mellota' je tikaw. _______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
-- Luciano Montanaro Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. -- Douglas Adams
On Thu, 21 Feb 2019 15:47:23 -0600, Daniel Dadap <daniel@dadap.net> wrote:
On Feb 21, 2019, at 12:13, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
how would we distinguish between the q and Q ?
The one other place where case matters is in distinguishing between ng+H and n+gh. I don’t think there are any word pairs where the difference would cause confusion, but that doesn’t mean there never will be.
For example, nobody is going to think that NENGHEP is nengHep, or that VENGHOM is venghom if they know the words nenghep and vengHom.
Perhaps the Esperanto 'x-convention' could be suitably adopted here, and for the same reason that it is used in Esperanto: 'x' isn't a letter in the alphabet. Thus, H -> hx and Q -> qx, and your examples become nenghep and venghxom. (side note: Esperanto has six letters that have diacritics; without the diacritics, they are indistinguishable from six other letters in the Esperanto alphabet. So, if you're using a keyboard that doesn't support the Esperanto diacritics, you use the 'matching' undiacritic-ized letter followed by 'x' to indicate the diacritic-ized letter.)
Using qh for Q could be problematic in a similar way for distinguishing q+H from Q. For example, is baqha' baqHa' or baQa'?
And these are baqhxa' and baqxa' respectively.
An encoding like xifan hol or a system with diacritics would avoid these issues.
FWIW I found SuStel’s example texts perfectly readable, but it does seem that old habits are hard to break (I saw a “DaH” in there rather than “Dah”, for example.) Also, I wonder, since qaghwI' can’t exactly be capital or lowercase, if the vowel following a qaghwI' in a word that begins with qaghwI' should be the one to be capitalized instead. For example:
Qu' dataghdi' 'Aktu' Mellota' je tikaw.
Since Klingon has fewer letters than than there are characters in most keyboards, it seems needless, if there was going to be a change in the system, to keep any multi-character letters. —jevreH Sent from my iPad
On Feb 22, 2019, at 07:26, Jeff Zeitlin <jzeitlin@cyburban.com> wrote:
On Thu, 21 Feb 2019 15:47:23 -0600, Daniel Dadap <daniel@dadap.net> wrote:
On Feb 21, 2019, at 12:13, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
how would we distinguish between the q and Q ?
The one other place where case matters is in distinguishing between ng+H and n+gh. I don’t think there are any word pairs where the difference would cause confusion, but that doesn’t mean there never will be.
For example, nobody is going to think that NENGHEP is nengHep, or that VENGHOM is venghom if they know the words nenghep and vengHom.
Perhaps the Esperanto 'x-convention' could be suitably adopted here, and for the same reason that it is used in Esperanto: 'x' isn't a letter in the alphabet. Thus, H -> hx and Q -> qx, and your examples become nenghep and venghxom.
(side note: Esperanto has six letters that have diacritics; without the diacritics, they are indistinguishable from six other letters in the Esperanto alphabet. So, if you're using a keyboard that doesn't support the Esperanto diacritics, you use the 'matching' undiacritic-ized letter followed by 'x' to indicate the diacritic-ized letter.)
Using qh for Q could be problematic in a similar way for distinguishing q+H from Q. For example, is baqha' baqHa' or baQa'?
And these are baqhxa' and baqxa' respectively.
An encoding like xifan hol or a system with diacritics would avoid these issues.
FWIW I found SuStel’s example texts perfectly readable, but it does seem that old habits are hard to break (I saw a “DaH” in there rather than “Dah”, for example.) Also, I wonder, since qaghwI' can’t exactly be capital or lowercase, if the vowel following a qaghwI' in a word that begins with qaghwI' should be the one to be capitalized instead. For example:
Qu' dataghdi' 'Aktu' Mellota' je tikaw.
tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
Not to be a spoilsport here, but written Klingon is defined by those who legally own it to be indecipherable and not understood. TKD presents a phonetic alphabet for spoken Klingon. It’s Okrand’s system, not Maltz’s, and since Okrand is the guy who dictates what is or is not the language, that’s the gold standard. As fans, we can play around with stuff, and I think that’s great. We have a pIqaD alphabet that was not initially approved, and then Skybox came along and now it’s official (I guess). So, sure, maybe something else we come up with will end up being used by some official entity, but I haven’t really heard a reason to replace Okrand’s romanized TKD alphabet, and there’s a lot of canon out there using it. Jump to something else and new users would suddenly have to learn two systems. If there were a compelling reason besides, “wouldn’t it be cool if…”, I could get behind it. I mean, it’s important to keep things interesting, but I’m not sure that the confusion this would probably create would be worth an actual shift. I’d see it more like the running joke we had for a while that we had when some of us wrote Klingon text backwards as a code (keeping the ligatures internally forward), just to see who could figure out what was being written. It was fun. It was interesting. We didn’t suggest we start writing everything backwards, though. Some human languages go right to left. I work with them. And at one point, Klingon was supposed to be read/written from the middle outward, but that was just to be weird. Eyes don’t track that pattern very well... charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan rInpa’ bomnIS be’’a’ pI’.
On Feb 22, 2019, at 7:52 AM, Jeffrey Clark <jmclark85@gmail.com> wrote:
Since Klingon has fewer letters than than there are characters in most keyboards, it seems needless, if there was going to be a change in the system, to keep any multi-character letters.
—jevreH
Sent from my iPad
On Feb 22, 2019, at 07:26, Jeff Zeitlin <jzeitlin@cyburban.com> wrote:
On Thu, 21 Feb 2019 15:47:23 -0600, Daniel Dadap <daniel@dadap.net> wrote:
On Feb 21, 2019, at 12:13, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
how would we distinguish between the q and Q ?
The one other place where case matters is in distinguishing between ng+H and n+gh. I don’t think there are any word pairs where the difference would cause confusion, but that doesn’t mean there never will be.
For example, nobody is going to think that NENGHEP is nengHep, or that VENGHOM is venghom if they know the words nenghep and vengHom.
Perhaps the Esperanto 'x-convention' could be suitably adopted here, and for the same reason that it is used in Esperanto: 'x' isn't a letter in the alphabet. Thus, H -> hx and Q -> qx, and your examples become nenghep and venghxom.
(side note: Esperanto has six letters that have diacritics; without the diacritics, they are indistinguishable from six other letters in the Esperanto alphabet. So, if you're using a keyboard that doesn't support the Esperanto diacritics, you use the 'matching' undiacritic-ized letter followed by 'x' to indicate the diacritic-ized letter.)
Using qh for Q could be problematic in a similar way for distinguishing q+H from Q. For example, is baqha' baqHa' or baQa'?
And these are baqhxa' and baqxa' respectively.
An encoding like xifan hol or a system with diacritics would avoid these issues.
FWIW I found SuStel’s example texts perfectly readable, but it does seem that old habits are hard to break (I saw a “DaH” in there rather than “Dah”, for example.) Also, I wonder, since qaghwI' can’t exactly be capital or lowercase, if the vowel following a qaghwI' in a word that begins with qaghwI' should be the one to be capitalized instead. For example:
Qu' dataghdi' 'Aktu' Mellota' je tikaw.
tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
On 2/22/2019 8:57 AM, mayqel qunen'oS wrote:
charghwI':
keeping the ligatures internally forward
What do you mean by that ?
Keeping digraphs the same. *tlhIch* backwards is *chItlh,* not *hcIhlt,* and so on. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
On 2/22/2019 8:55 AM, Will Martin wrote:
As fans, we can play around with stuff, and I think that’s great.
So, sure, maybe something else we come up with will end up being used by some official entity, but I haven’t really heard a reason to replace Okrand’s romanized TKD alphabet, and there’s a lot of canon out there using it. Jump to something else and new users would suddenly have to learn two systems.
Nobody is talking about replacing anything. The conversation is about what Klingon would look like if a less odd-looking system were used. This is playing around with stuff as fans. In the past people have barged in and announced that they were going to spearhead the effort to force Okrand to adopt a more sensible system. That's not happening here. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
On Feb 22, 2019, at 07:55, Will Martin <willmartin2@mac.com> wrote:
As fans, we can play around with stuff, and I think that’s great. We have a pIqaD alphabet that was not initially approved, and then Skybox came along and now it’s official (I guess).
The Skybox pIqaD system has no resemblance to KLI pIqaD other than some of the letters looking the same (but representing different sounds). I think the Skybox pIqaD system only has something like 10 distinct characters, each of them being used to represent multiple letters. I say letters and not sounds because things like tlh got written out as either skybox t + skybox l + skybox H or skybox t + skybox l or skybox t + skybox H. The triangles for punctuation convention did originate with the skybox cards, however. If anything, maybe the use of a font based on KLI pIqaD on-screen in Star Trek Discovery makes KLI pIqaD somewhat official, but that’s Star Trek official and not Marc Okrand official, since those are two different things. What Okrand says about pIqaD is that little is known about it, except that it’s not an alphabet. Yet KLI pIqaD is precisely that, so it’s clearly not what Okrand had in mind. We still use and enjoy it, though.
Am 22.02.2019 um 15:09 schrieb Daniel Dadap:
What Okrand says about pIqaD is that little is known about it, except that it’s not an alphabet. Yet KLI pIqaD is precisely that, so it’s clearly not what Okrand had in mind. We still use and enjoy it, though.
Okrand wrote that before the existence of the KLI. He certainly just wanted to avoid saying anything wrong so he wrote that nothing is known. His job was to describe the language, not the letters. -- Lieven L. Litaer aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany" http://www.klingonisch.de http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/PIqaD
On 2/22/2019 9:20 AM, Lieven L. Litaer wrote:
Am 22.02.2019 um 15:09 schrieb Daniel Dadap:
What Okrand says about pIqaD is that little is known about it, except that it’s not an alphabet. Yet KLI pIqaD is precisely that, so it’s clearly not what Okrand had in mind. We still use and enjoy it, though.
Okrand wrote that before the existence of the KLI. He certainly just wanted to avoid saying anything wrong so he wrote that nothing is known. His job was to describe the language, not the letters.
He knew perfectly well that written Klingon on the shows and movies was nonsense made to look good. It's not that he didn't want to be wrong; there is simply no right answer. He /could not/ explain the *pIqaD* shown up to that point, because it was meaningless decoration. Saying "not yet fully understood" was just a tongue-in-cheek way of avoiding the problem in this novelty book he was writing that surely no one would remember in a couple of years. It's exactly analogous to the explanation Worf gives in "Trials and Tribble-ations" as to why the Klingons of a century ago look so different. "We do not discuss it with outsiders." It's a funny way of spotlighting the problem just long enough to ignore it. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 9:20 AM Lieven L. Litaer <levinius@gmx.de> wrote:
Okrand wrote that before the existence of the KLI. He certainly just wanted to avoid saying anything wrong so he wrote that nothing is known. His job was to describe the language, not the letters.
There's apparently a PhD thesis whose author interviewed Okrand, titled "Klingon as linguistic capital". http://www.angelfire.com/trek/yensw/PDF/thesis.pdf (I'm sure Lieven knew about this thesis already, I'm just mentioning it for the group.) When Okrand was asked about pIqaD: "The mapping is very cleverly done... I think it is great, it makes it so you can write the language... I wish I could read it, when I get something written in pIqaD I'm able to very slowly figure it out... I am glad someone really is doing it and has decided that it is an alphabet and not a syllabary. Now we know, 'cause Michael Okuda and I didn't know that." Perhaps this means that Maltz was simply less forthcoming with orthography information in the early days of their partnership. (He was probably still salty over being captured by Kirk.) Or perhaps the Klingon Empire had been using a more complex writing system at the time that was eventually replaced by the simpler alphabetic pIqaD, and the distinction between the variants of pIqaD wasn't obvious to outsiders. There are plenty of ways to make the canon work in your head, I think. (I'm not sure it needs to be explained, though. When science fiction tries to come up with in-setting explanations for things that are clearly just production issues -- like why all the alien races on Star Trek look like humans with prosthetics -- it often falls flat.) On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 9:09 AM Daniel Dadap <daniel@dadap.net> wrote:
If anything, maybe the use of a font based on KLI pIqaD on-screen in Star Trek Discovery makes KLI pIqaD somewhat official, but that’s Star Trek official and not Marc Okrand official, since those are two different things.
True, but it seems Star Trek official is a subset of Marc Okrand official. There are things MO has said that aren't "official" Star Trek canon, like the details of how gagh is prepared. But for the most part, he seems willing to accept what Star Trek presents for Klingons and work around the issues, even if that means pointing to some gibberish from DS9 and saying it's just an older form of the language. He even takes a similarly diplomatic approach to stuff that's important to Klingon fans, even if it's not TV-show official, like some of the words from "The Klingon Art of War", accepting {mInyoD} from Klingon Hamlet, and the time he translated various Klingonaase titles used by fans. (And even the words from "The Klingon Art of War" that he didn't sign off on, he explained away as "well, Maltz says that might be an archaic term he's not heard before", rather than outright saying Keith DeCandido screwed up.) Also, as for using other symbols to represent sounds: There are a few languages that use the numeral 7 to represent the glottal stop, since it looks sort of similar to the IPA symbol for a glottal stop (which is kind of a ? without the dot). {Daj ngutlhvam 7e7 DaQub7a7}
Just to toss another alternative that at least a few of us might be familiar with, Lawrence Shoen’s pIqaD font maps single-letter keys to what are currently multiple character representations of Klingon consonants. Anyone who has used the font already knows how to type with this character set. It would require very little practice to learn to read it. It’s one advantage is reduced character count to represent the same text. Then case would not matter, since Q and q are different keystrokes. But it’s just something to play with. I understand that if you have no interest in playing, then why are you learning Klingon in the first place. I get that. I didn’t intend to squash creativity, though likely that is how it came across. Sent from my iPhone. charghwI vaghnerya’ngan
On Feb 22, 2019, at 9:09 AM, Daniel Dadap <daniel@dadap.net> wrote:
On Feb 22, 2019, at 07:55, Will Martin <willmartin2@mac.com> wrote:
As fans, we can play around with stuff, and I think that’s great. We have a pIqaD alphabet that was not initially approved, and then Skybox came along and now it’s official (I guess).
The Skybox pIqaD system has no resemblance to KLI pIqaD other than some of the letters looking the same (but representing different sounds). I think the Skybox pIqaD system only has something like 10 distinct characters, each of them being used to represent multiple letters. I say letters and not sounds because things like tlh got written out as either skybox t + skybox l + skybox H or skybox t + skybox l or skybox t + skybox H.
The triangles for punctuation convention did originate with the skybox cards, however.
If anything, maybe the use of a font based on KLI pIqaD on-screen in Star Trek Discovery makes KLI pIqaD somewhat official, but that’s Star Trek official and not Marc Okrand official, since those are two different things.
What Okrand says about pIqaD is that little is known about it, except that it’s not an alphabet. Yet KLI pIqaD is precisely that, so it’s clearly not what Okrand had in mind. We still use and enjoy it, though. _______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
On Feb 22, 2019, at 09:28, Will Martin <willmartin2@mac.com> wrote:
Lawrence Shoen’s pIqaD font maps single-letter keys to what are currently multiple character representations of Klingon consonants. Anyone who has used the font already knows how to type with this character set. It would require very little practice to learn to read it.
Right, if I’m not mistaken, that mapping is the genesis of what we’ve been calling “xifan hol” in this discussion, though I believe originally it was “XIFAN HOL” since the font used capital letters for the Astra glyphs, and lowercase ones for the Mandel system from the U.S.S. Enterprise Officer’s Manual.
When I bought the font, I owned font editing software, so I replaced the lowercase characters with a copy of its uppercase equivalent, so case would not matter. I also painstakingly kerned every possible character combination. Lawrence subsequently kerned the font, so it looks much better than the earlier version. I think the font I now use on my Mac is my modified version, but I never managed to get it into iOS, and I’m not even sure if I still have it on the Mac... And I didn’t pay for an upgrade when Fontographer failed to survive an OS upgrade. And it never worked in Email, where I would have most wanted to use it... Sent from my iPhone. charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan
On Feb 22, 2019, at 10:33 AM, Daniel Dadap <daniel@dadap.net> wrote:
On Feb 22, 2019, at 09:28, Will Martin <willmartin2@mac.com> wrote:
Lawrence Shoen’s pIqaD font maps single-letter keys to what are currently multiple character representations of Klingon consonants. Anyone who has used the font already knows how to type with this character set. It would require very little practice to learn to read it.
Right, if I’m not mistaken, that mapping is the genesis of what we’ve been calling “xifan hol” in this discussion, though I believe originally it was “XIFAN HOL” since the font used capital letters for the Astra glyphs, and lowercase ones for the Mandel system from the U.S.S. Enterprise Officer’s Manual. _______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
On Feb 22, 2019, at 09:42, Will Martin <willmartin2@mac.com> wrote:
I think the font I now use on my Mac is my modified version, but I never managed to get it into iOS, and I’m not even sure if I still have it on the Mac...
For iOS if you want a font to be available to all apps you need to install it via a configuration profile. Unfortunately even this doesn’t help /that/ much, since most apps won’t let you select a font.
And I didn’t pay for an upgrade when Fontographer failed to survive an OS upgrade. And it never worked in Email, where I would have most wanted to use it...
That’s why newer pIqaD fonts use the Conscript registry mapping of the BMP’s Private Use Area. Unfortunately, since pIqaD isn’t part of the official Unicode standard that means anybody else can define their own characters in that same space. This is especially problematic on macOS/iOS as Apple chose to use the same codepoint to represent the Apple logo as the Conscript registry assigned to the Klingon empire symbol. (Well, the mapping calls it a “mummification glyph” which is not necessarily the same thing, but every font I’ve seen puts the trefoil in that spot.) You still have to have a suitable font installed on the receiving end, but at least some font renderers will automatically select a font that defines the appropriate characters (e.g. a pIqaD font, if you have one installed) if the font it would have otherwise used doesn’t define them. In practice it works somewhat reasonably well.
Am 22.02.2019 um 14:55 schrieb Will Martin:
As fans, we can play around with stuff, and I think that’s great. We have a pIqaD alphabet that was not initially approved, and then Skybox came along and now it’s official (I guess).
The short stry is that someone created a font based on movie screen images, it became common trough the KLI, and then someone from the KLI used it for Discovrey, where it now became somehow official. It has become so commonly used that I doubt any new system will ever be accepted. -- Lieven L. Litaer aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany" http://www.klingonisch.de http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/StarTrekDiscovery
On Feb 22, 2019, at 06:52, Jeffrey Clark <jmclark85@gmail.com> wrote:
Since Klingon has fewer letters than than there are characters in most keyboards, it seems needless, if there was going to be a change in the system, to keep any multi-character letters.
The operative part being “if there was going to be a change in this system”. Klingon orthography reform has been proposed countless times, and perhaps a phase of “this spelling system is terrible, why don’t we do this instead!” is something of an initiation ritual for the new Klingonist (ngutlhghep, perhaps?). The reality though is that as problematic as the system may be, it’s the one we’ve had for 35 years, and all useful materials on the language utilize it. Unless it’s Okrandian transliteration or KLI pIqaD, you won’t find any level of agreement over an alternate spelling convention - even xifan hol could go a couple of different ways (nukneh quzvax vs. nuqneh kuzvax). Sure, you could probably come up with a system that most if not almost all people would be able to read without trouble, but there is a lot of inertia in the existing orthography. (I know that jevreH and probably most on the list know all this already.) This isn’t to say that we should stop thinking of ways that work better for us as individuals to transcribe the sounds of the language, just don’t expect that others will accept an alternate system. I personally like xifan hol because it’s fairly efficient, but things like f -> ng are admittedly a bit weird. But like jevreH said, if we were ever to be granted the opportunity to reform the orthography, I would hope all the major pain points could be remedied: * Case sensitivity: it’s one thing that letters like D and S are capitalized all the time; it’s another that if a text is transformed to all uppercase or all lowercase the distinctions between q/Q and ngh/ngH get lost. * qaghwI': using a punctuation mark as a letter is problematic for many inferior Terran information systems. * I and l: these Ietters Iook slmlIar or somtlmes ldentlcaI ln Iots of lnferlor Iatln scrlpt fonts. * Multi-character letters: I don’t mind these so much, but words like tlhutlhqangchu'ghach use up more space than they probably need to. However, the other extreme of xifan hol’s rendition of this as xuxkafcuzgac isn’t exactly as intuitively legible to a beginner.
Am 22.02.2019 um 15:01 schrieb Daniel Dadap:
The operative part being “if there was going to be a change in this system”. Klingon orthography reform has been proposed countless times,
Just for anyone interested, there's apage on that in the Klingon wiki: http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/OrthographicReform and perhaps a phase of “this spelling system is terrible, why don’t we do this instead!” is something of an initiation ritual for the new Klingonist (ngutlhghep, perhaps?).
The reality though is that as problematic as the system may be, it’s the one we’ve had for 35 years, and all useful materials on the language utilize it.
Yes, the problem its that we're used to it, and we've been using it for so long. Theoreteically, if this would be changed, all newcomers would be confused as hell, not knowing which ressources to use. There could be a "reformed print" of Hamlet and so on, but that will quickly stop at things like the Monopoly or the subtitles on Netflix. The language community s not as larger as esperanto (or any natural language) where there are millions of speakers and students who will work or discuss on the reformation progress. All just theoretically spoken. I can certainly live with the okrandian spelling, but I think it destroy a little bit the credibility of the Klingon language, because for outsiders, it quickly looks like nonsense. "Zurkliop emgrk koserkt" look more natural than "eM'el Rok purgWvft"
* Case sensitivity: it’s one thing that letters like D and S are capitalized all the time;
That would be easy to replace, as it doesnt change anything.
* it’s another that if a text is transformed to all uppercase or all lowercase the distinctions between q/Q and ngh/ngH get lost.
That's amajor problem.
* qaghwI': using a punctuation mark as a letter is problematic for many inferior Terran information systems.
Not only punctuation marks, especially the apostrophe is used even more often than others. Doing Klingon localisations often need "escaping" the apostrophe, which is relaly annoying. In Excel, you cannot start a cell with an apostrophe. In Navi, a similar sound to this is written as an x.
* I and l: these Ietters Iook slmlIar or somtlmes ldentlcaI ln Iots of lnferlor Iatln scrlpt fonts.
I'd love to replace that, for just this reason.
* Multi-character letters: I don’t mind these so much, but words like tlhutlhqangchu'ghach use up more space than they probably need to. However, the other extreme of xifan hol’s rendition of this as xuxkafcuzgac isn’t exactly as intuitively legible to a beginner.
I certainly would not use the x for that sound, but also not for H. ----- As abottom line I'd like to add that I know we cannot change the system. I'm just talking about this theoretically. Lieven. -- Lieven L. Litaer aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany" http://www.klingonisch.de http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/OrthographicReform
You can start a cell with an apostrophe in Excel by starting it with TWO apostrophes. The second one shows. Sent from my iPhone. charghwI’ vaghnerya’ngan
On Feb 22, 2019, at 9:35 AM, Lieven L. Litaer <levinius@gmx.de> wrote:
Am 22.02.2019 um 15:01 schrieb Daniel Dadap: The operative part being “if there was going to be a change in this system”. Klingon orthography reform has been proposed countless times,
Just for anyone interested, there's apage on that in the Klingon wiki: http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/OrthographicReform
and perhaps a phase of “this spelling system is terrible, why don’t we do this instead!” is something of an initiation ritual for the new Klingonist (ngutlhghep, perhaps?).
The reality though is that as problematic as the system may be, it’s the one we’ve had for 35 years, and all useful materials on the language utilize it.
Yes, the problem its that we're used to it, and we've been using it for so long. Theoreteically, if this would be changed, all newcomers would be confused as hell, not knowing which ressources to use. There could be a "reformed print" of Hamlet and so on, but that will quickly stop at things like the Monopoly or the subtitles on Netflix. The language community s not as larger as esperanto (or any natural language) where there are millions of speakers and students who will work or discuss on the reformation progress. All just theoretically spoken.
I can certainly live with the okrandian spelling, but I think it destroy a little bit the credibility of the Klingon language, because for outsiders, it quickly looks like nonsense.
"Zurkliop emgrk koserkt" look more natural than "eM'el Rok purgWvft"
* Case sensitivity: it’s one thing that letters like D and S are capitalized all the time;
That would be easy to replace, as it doesnt change anything.
* it’s another that if a text is transformed to all uppercase or all lowercase the distinctions between q/Q and ngh/ngH get lost.
That's amajor problem.
* qaghwI': using a punctuation mark as a letter is problematic for many inferior Terran information systems.
Not only punctuation marks, especially the apostrophe is used even more often than others. Doing Klingon localisations often need "escaping" the apostrophe, which is relaly annoying. In Excel, you cannot start a cell with an apostrophe.
In Navi, a similar sound to this is written as an x.
* I and l: these Ietters Iook slmlIar or somtlmes ldentlcaI ln Iots of lnferlor Iatln scrlpt fonts.
I'd love to replace that, for just this reason.
* Multi-character letters: I don’t mind these so much, but words like tlhutlhqangchu'ghach use up more space than they probably need to. However, the other extreme of xifan hol’s rendition of this as xuxkafcuzgac isn’t exactly as intuitively legible to a beginner.
I certainly would not use the x for that sound, but also not for H.
-----
As abottom line I'd like to add that I know we cannot change the system. I'm just talking about this theoretically.
Lieven.
-- Lieven L. Litaer aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany" http://www.klingonisch.de http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/OrthographicReform _______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
Am 22.02.2019 um 16:33 schrieb Will Martin:
You can start a cell with an apostrophe in Excel by starting it with TWO apostrophes. The second one shows.
Yes, I figured that out already, but that's very annoying if you like to make words lists for Klingon vocabulary. It has happened more than once that words lost their apostophe due to this reason. -- Lieven L. Litaer aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany" http://www.klingonisch.de http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/StarTrekDiscovery
On 2/22/2019 10:40 AM, Lieven L. Litaer wrote:
Am 22.02.2019 um 16:33 schrieb Will Martin:
You can start a cell with an apostrophe in Excel by starting it with TWO apostrophes. The second one shows.
Yes, I figured that out already, but that's very annoying if you like to make words lists for Klingon vocabulary. It has happened more than once that words lost their apostophe due to this reason.
I still find myself replacing lost apostrophes for this very reason. An apostrophe at the beginning of a cell is treated as a special control character that forces the rest of the contents of the cell to be read literally, not interpreted. For instance, something that looks like a date but isn't can be forced to keep its correct form instead of being converted into a date. -- SuStel http://trimboli.name
Going back to the Esperanto example, some find the Xs ugly and prefer the H-convention. So like "Mi shatas skribi chi tiel char iksoj malplachas al mi". But then there's the same issue Daniel mentioned, of knowing when gh is ĝ and when it's just a g followed by an h. Someone proficient in the language knows that "flughaveno" (airport) is not "fluĝaveno" because that's not a word. But for readability it's good to distinguish the two, and for that a common solution is to use a hyphen: "flug-haveno". So, I suppose in the hypothetical situation that a system like the ones described here was adopted, one could say nen-ghep, veng-hom, etc. Not especially beautiful, but I've seen worse :-P. As for uppercase qaghwI', well, if I hit shift while I type it, I get " - violá! XD -Qhista' On Feb 21, 2019 2:47 PM, "Daniel Dadap" <daniel@dadap.net> wrote:
On Feb 21, 2019, at 12:13, mayqel qunen'oS <mihkoun@gmail.com> wrote:
how would we distinguish between the q and Q ?
The one other place where case matters is in distinguishing between ng+H and n+gh. I don’t think there are any word pairs where the difference would cause confusion, but that doesn’t mean there never will be.
For example, nobody is going to think that NENGHEP is nengHep, or that VENGHOM is venghom if they know the words nenghep and vengHom.
Using qh for Q could be problematic in a similar way for distinguishing q+H from Q. For example, is baqha' baqHa' or baQa'?
An encoding like xifan hol or a system with diacritics would avoid these issues.
FWIW I found SuStel’s example texts perfectly readable, but it does seem that old habits are hard to break (I saw a “DaH” in there rather than “Dah”, for example.) Also, I wonder, since qaghwI' can’t exactly be capital or lowercase, if the vowel following a qaghwI' in a word that begins with qaghwI' should be the one to be capitalized instead. For example:
Qu' dataghdi' 'Aktu' Mellota' je tikaw. _______________________________________________ tlhIngan-Hol mailing list tlhIngan-Hol@lists.kli.org http://lists.kli.org/listinfo.cgi/tlhingan-hol-kli.org
On Feb 22, 2019, at 19:35, Christa Hansberry <chransberry@gmail.com> wrote:
As for uppercase qaghwI', well, if I hit shift while I type it, I get " - violá! XD
choHaghmoHbejpu'! But then you’ll get people asking if so''egh has a double lowercase qaghwI' or a single uppercase one. (jIqIDba')
On Feb 22, 2019, at 19:35, Christa Hansberry <chransberry@gmail.com> wrote:
As for uppercase qaghwI', well, if I hit shift while I type it, I get " - violá! XD
Don't foget different keyboard layouts. I have to hit Shift each time I type a qaghwI'. If I don't, it's a #. That's why some font layouts use z for the qaghwI'. -- Lieven L. Litaer aka the "Klingon Teacher from Germany" http://www.klingonisch.de http://www.klingonwiki.net/En/Fonts
participants (11)
-
Christa Hansberry -
Daniel Dadap -
Jeff Zeitlin -
Jeffrey Clark -
Lieven L. Litaer -
Luciano Montanaro -
mayqel qunen'oS -
mayqel qunenoS
-
nIqolay Q -
SuStel -
Will Martin