[556] in tlhIngan-Hol
Letter cases in spelling; etc
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Apr 14 10:56:01 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
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
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: (Mark E. Shoulson) <shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 93 09:59:30 -0400
In-Reply-To: mark's message of Tue, 13 Apr 93 13:21:23 EST <9304131321.A05342@d
We seem to see a lot of attempts to revise the orthography, and I guess by
the "where there's smoke there's fire" theory that would imply that there's
something wrong with it. And maybe there is. But I haven't yet been
convinced that it's worth invalidating the usage in the only "official"
texts we have and making new recruits wonder what's going on when they see
"GrzGik" and somehow have to know that in order to look it up in their
dictionaries they have to look under "nuqneH". So long as the language has
a "deity", an ultimate authority, we really have to listen to him. What's
more, it's only his method of writing that's commonly available to people,
and thus it's the only one that we can count on being understood. Maybe it
wasn't the greatest system to start with, but it's what we have. Some
alternate methods avoid case-distinctions, some use it to avoid digraphs
and trigraphs, and so on and so forth. Some introduce ambiguities, some
don't; none seem to sort correctly, but that's not so terrible. I'm
willing to see I's written lowercase now and then, because of the
difficulty with l's, but generally I think we should stick with what we
have.
I've been studying Hebrew since nursery school. Despite what typewriters
say, Hebrew has no upper case. Really. It has five letters which are
written differently at the ends of words, but those are finials, not
capitals, and only five of the 22 letters are like that. There are
multiple typefaces and fonts that are used in signs and notes and titles
and such, but we have those in English too, and they don't show up on my
typewriter or in my email.
~mark
