[Tlhingan-hol] 2 letter language code for Klingon?

[Josh Badgley]

bIlughbej Mark.  I am very pleased with pIqaD as is.  I have found it incredibly easy to learn to write, and my reading skills are coming along well.  And I wanted to add a few thoughts.  First of all, the idea that pIqaD "turn[ing] out to be nothing more than a simple alphabet" is not so far-fetched.  Perhaps those of us living in Western countries who are accustomed to the Latin alphabet would find it more "alien" if pIqaD turned out to be an abudiga a la Devanagari or an even more complex system (like Chinese), but we are not the only humans on the planet. Perhaps a native speaker of a language written in Devanagari would find it equally "exotic" and "alien" to have an alphabet such as ours where the letters are not joined together and each consonant does not have an inherent "a" sound.  What I am saying is that there seems to be no way to devise a "litmus test" to determine whether or not the pIqaD that is now canon is sufficiently "alien" enough.  And I would also argue that perhaps Klingons would find such a system much more straightforward and economical.  Perhaps it would be easier for Klingon children to learn, meaning that they could spend less time on learning the alphabet and more time learning the art of war.  

Just a few thoughts, I probably don't know what I'm talking about, but I think for now what we have is pretty damn cool.


-- jhb


> Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2011 07:23:18 -0400
> From: mark at kli.org
> To: tlhingan-hol at stodi.digitalkingdom.org
> Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] 2 letter language code for Klingon?
> 
> On 10/05/2011 09:22 AM, David Trimboli wrote:
> > I, for one, will be
> > quite disappointed if it turns out that the poorly understood pIqaD that
> > handles all the dialects well mentioned in TKD turns out to be nothing more
> > than a simple alphabet that happens to exactly match the transcription
> > system introduced in the same book. What a waste!
> 
> It might be disappointing, and it would be cooler if it were otherwise, 
> but it should be noted that if it really be as simple as that, even so 
> that would be completely feasible as a "real" language. Such things 
> happen all the time, when spellings get set to a standard dialect.
> 
> ~mark
> 
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