[555] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Spelling: 'i' versus 'I'
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Apr 14 09:56:42 1993
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
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Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: A.APPLEYARD@fs1.mt.umist.ac.uk
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: 14 Apr 93 13:40:53 GMT
(Discussion re 'I' versus 'i' (eye) and confusion in reading with 'l' (ell))
> From: Michael Everson <EVERSON@IRLEARN.UCD.IE>:-
> Use a serif font. Or ignore the convention and type i. But it won't
be standard.
But people can't always choose font! Computer and wordprocessor screens and
typewriters display the font that they have. Apart from sans-serif fonts, the
only real distinction in ordinary (not italic or script) fonts is that
uppercase 'eye' has serifs on all four corners, and lowercase 'ell' has only
three, lacking the top right serif. Sometimes but not nowhere near always, the
top left serif on lowercase 'ell' is sloping. Serifs are small and fiddly to
look for. It is likely for that reason that some forms of DOS-5 have lowercase
'l' script fashion with a curved lower end, to try to distinguish. Please! In
Australia in 1984 when observing the far south stars I had my fill of peering
at serifs to try to distinguish uppercase from lowercase from Greek star
identity letters casually strewn about the star map by Lacaille when he
resurveyed Argo Navis and Centaurus that time. How soon will anyone official
be able to contact Okrand and get an OK from him on the matter of 'i'/'I'? And
more generally about what to do in signalling media that have only one case of
letters? And re any new vocabulary that needs to be invented? Do we need to
wait for the next edition of his book?, or can he issue the authorizations
here and in HolQeD?
>> Personally I'd like to see Klingon with diacritics ... q-hacek for Q ...
Please no diacritics. Diacritics are troublesome. For example, many of the
PC diacriticked letters are in the range ASCII 128 to 159, and some media
including my Epson printer in default mode treat them modulo 128 as control
characters wrecking the layout of the resulting printing. If needs arise to
distinguish digraph from two separate letters (e.g. 'qh' = 'Q' from 'qh' =
separate 'q' and 'h') (h = glottalstop, if the signalling medium has no
apostrophe code), put a dot between. No confusion with fullstop, as fullstop
always has a space or other non-alphanumeric character after it.
