[419] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Klingon alphabet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue Jan 5 15:38:29 1993
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Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Cc: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 11:02:00 PST
In-Reply-To: "tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma:us:Xerox's message of 4 Ja
Alan C. Wechsler:
>the alphabets we have seen so far may or may not be pIqaD.
There is certainly a lot of wiggle room for pIqaD. Okrand informs us that the
Klingon language itself is quite seriously divided into dialects, with the
dialect of the current emperor becoming normative. In such circumstances, it
would not be surprising at all to find many variations in the orthographies
used to write Klingon. Even completely different orthographies. (An
orthography, also called a "script" or "writing system," is a set of symbols
and conventions for using them to record a language. It is important to make a
distinction between languages and the orthographies used to write them down.)
This would parallel the situation with many terran languages, such as Serbian
and Croation. Serbs and Croats are ethnically identical and speak essentially
the same language, but the Serbs use an orthography based on the cyrillic
alphabet while the Croats use an orthography based on the roman alphabet.
A new Klingon emperor might impose his/her own favorite orthography, or several
scripts might coexist for different kinds of text, or different orthographies
might be mixed within a single text, as in the terran Japanese system. Nothing
should surprise us too much.
A Wechsler suggestion:
>Some characters might only appear in proper names.
For the purposes of computational linguistics, it would be very useful to have
a symbol, probably silent, that marks a word as being a proper name. To some
extent this is marked in standard English orthography by capitalizing proper
names within sentences. The ability to distinguish proper names can be a huge
help in parsing.
Ken
beesley.parc@xerox.com
