[561] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Letter cases in spelling; etc
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Apr 14 15:44:43 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: Ken_Beesley.PARC@xerox.com
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 11:07:02 PDT
In-Reply-To: "A.APPLEYARD@fs1.mt.umist.ac:uk:Xerox's message of Wed, 14 Apr 199
>>I imagine that a
Klingon writing in the pIQaD alphabet, or any human writing in a caseless
spelling system like Chinese, would emphasize at need likely by writing in
larger characters - as the abovementioned Hebrew typewriter did, and likely
native Klingon pIQaD typewriters do. And the Roman alphabet equivalent of this
is uppercasing.<<
1. pIqaD, not *pIQaD
2. The European distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters is a
fairly modern one. It did not exist in the original Latin orthography(ies).
(Latin textbooks today usually impose the modern case distinctions, but Cicero
would not have recognized them.) The modern Hebrew keyboard that you saw may
also be borrowing a convention from modern European orthographies. Even the
European convention of separating words with spaces is fairly modern, and there
are many modern languages, including Japanese and many languages of northern
India, where the standard orthography just runs the words together.
In the end, all the information we have suggests that Klingon has no
uppercase/lowercase distinction. Any arguments about the usefullness of such a
distinction, or the presence of such a distinction in a particular
human-language orthography, are beside the point.
Ken Beesley
