[407] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Klingon alphabet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Dec 23 12:18:22 1992
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Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk (Richard Kennaway)
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 14:48:30 +0000
This is cross-posted to the Klingon mailing list. For readers of that
list,
a recap: there has been some discussion on the conlang list about the
unrealism (if that's a word) of the Klingon font. How could it possibly
have been written? Not with a pen or a brush, but then how?
Mark Shoulson writes:
>I'm still unconvinced. Even knives basically work like pens, with a
>certain control over pen-width. Besides, whatever bizarre method was used,
>I'm sure modern Klingons would use something pen-like, and thus their
>handwritten script would surely look drastically different from the printed
>font we have. The script we have relies too heavily on filled-in shapes
>for it ever to have been drawn by nearly any method (Hmmm.... maybe cutting
>out outlines from a thin sheet? That way you wouldn't have to fill in the
>dark areas...) It seems that someone just sat down and decided to make a
>sufficiently alien-looking set of symbols and call it a script. Which is
>surely what happened....
The written Klingon that we have samples of is, I believe, all either
printed or displayed on computer screens. The limitations of handwriting
implements do not apply to those media. Of course, it must have been
produced by hand at one time. The suggestion of wax tablets suggested to
me not cutting the wax with a knife, but impressing the wax with a rod with
some sort of shaped tip. A brief look at the font suggests to me that this
might be possible, but I'll have to think about just how the tool should be
shaped. Since it is no doubt a long time since impressing wax tablets was
the primary method of writing, the characters may have undergone some
mutation since then.
I would guess that there is a handwritten version, which might resemble
the one we know no more than our own lower-case script resembles upper-case
printing.
To find out about this hypothetical script, we need to get ST:TNG to
include
a sample of handwritten Klingon, so that Okrand will have to invent it.
-- ____
Richard Kennaway \ _/__ School of Information Systems
Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \X / University of East Anglia
uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.
