[418] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Klingon alphabet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue Jan 5 01:42:19 1993
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Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Allan C. Wechsler <ACW@RIVERSIDE.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 13:57-0500
In-Reply-To: <9212240933.A03016@dragonsys.COM>
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 1992 09:33 EST
From: mark <mark@dragonsys.COM>
Suppose the earliest ancestor of pIqaD was blots and smears made
with a hand wet with some pigment. (Perhaps the first Klingon
"writing" was made with the blood of the prey, or victim, on the
body itself, to identify the killer/owner.) The marks would be
broad and areal, not linear. Even if modern Klingons do use
pen(like implement)s, pIqaD may maintain a conservative tradition
of shaped solid areas.
Intriguing. I had a similar thought: that the original system involved
embedding animal teeth in a substrate, probably clay.
By the way, we shouldn't jump to any conclusions -- the alphabets we
have seen so far may or may not be pIqaD. A couple of offhand comments
by Okrand imply that pIqaD is not a simple alphabet. I for one am
hoping for something a little more quirky, and I'd be disappointed by a
purely phonetic code. Some ideas:
1. A single character for the syllable coda -rgh.
2. Variant forms of characters for syllable onsets and codas.
3. Special characters for affixes, especially for the pronominal verb
prefixes.
Other possible hacks, that I would consider if I were Okrand:
4. Some distinctions might not be reflected in the script; for example
o and u might be written the same -- the reader would simply have to use
context.
5. There might be distinctions in the script (eg., two glottal stops)
that don't appear in speech; the writer would have to know which to use
in each word. Such distinctions might preserve features of an earlier
stage in the language.
6. Some words could have completely irregular spellings.
7. Some characters might only appear in proper names.
In other words, I'd like to find out that the Klingon writing system has
developed over the centuries in an advanced civilization with a long
history and deep traditions. It would seem unKlingonlike for their
writing system to be devoid of challenge and subtlety.
Another idea: the characters for the digits might retain some traces of
the ancestral ternary system.
