[86051] in tlhIngan-Hol

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Re: Klingon orthography

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Doq)
Sat Jun 27 15:11:34 2009

From: Doq <doq@embarqmail.com>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
In-Reply-To: <1D17D329-E7A3-421D-9C30-FC710DCBB266@evertype.com>
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:09:43 -0400
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org

I said what I meant. i didn't really need a translation.

Look at Cherokee. Sequoia came up with a hand-written script mostly  
made of loops, imitating cursive English which he had looked at, but  
couldn't read, and he took it to a typesetter and asked if he could  
print this. The typesetter ignored what Sequoia did, except to reach  
in his box and grab 89 characters (later dropping one, since two of  
them were eventually discovered to be identical in sound) and randomly  
assign them to each letter of the syllabary and those arbitrary  
characters (normal roman characters set sometimes at unconventional  
orientations) are now the official Cherokee alphabet.

Alphabets are arbitrary. Trying to apply rules from one language to  
characters in a different language is an exercise in ignorance. You  
are playing baseball with a golf club, commenting on what distaste you  
feel for all these primitive wooden clubs and aluminum tubes the rest  
of us are using.

You don't have my scorn. I reserve that for those who have earned it.  
There aren't many. I consider it to be foolish to scorn those who are  
merely annoying. ghIlab ghewmey yIbuSHa'.

I was not at my best in my earlier post, rather sleep deprived. After  
a day at work, I spent the evening selecting dances and working out a  
program for an evening of dance that a couple friends and I will be  
calling for in a bit under a month, and I thought I'd just catch up on  
e-mail before hitting the sack. I was quite surprised to see such a  
large fraction of a hundred messages on this list, about half of which  
you had written, all in the span of about two days. It seemed a bit  
extreme. I'm glad there's discussion on the list, but, jeeze...

My point is that your self-appointed authority drives you to tell  
other people what they meant to say, as if you are the only person  
with the authority to explain to everyone how things really go. That  
attitude fuels a lot of unpleasant e-mail on this list. I'm guilty of  
it, and I genuinely apologize for participating in this folly.

Mark Okrand has authority on the language. The rest of us are fans,  
theorists, and often blowhards. It's fun blowing hard, but there's a  
balance to be striven for.

It's not really the quality of what you say. It's the stunning  
quantity, repetition, failure to show any interest in listening to  
anyone except to respond, explaining how each person is completely  
wrong and you are completely right that inspires the sarcasm that you  
misread as scorn.

Sarcasm, yes. Lighten up. Scorn, no. Lighten up.

Lighten up, in both quantity and quality, and you won't be in the  
center of so much conflict.

Doq

On Jun 25, 2009, at 3:30 AM, Michael Everson wrote:

> On 25 Jun 2009, at 06:38, Doq wrote:
>
>> In the Klingon language, {q} and {Q} are different letters.
>
> Perhaps you mean "in the standard Latin orthography for Klingon as
> devised in 1985, q and Q are treated as separate letters". Or perhaps
> you mean "q and Q are used to indicate different phonemes".
>
> This is a question of character set technology, however, and the case-
> pair equivalence between these two characters is
>
>> Likely, you will respond by repeating yourself yet again, as if you
>> think we apparently didn't read the dozen or two previous posts
>> you've  already made in one day on the topic.
>
> Gosh, thanks for your sarcasm and your scorn.
>
> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
>
>
>
>





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