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

Fri Oct 7 07:05:40 PDT 2011

I know from his Web site that SuStel came up with an interesting alphabet derived from Tolkien languages that used diacritical marks to represent vowels following the consonants to which they are applied. While this is spatially efficient, it's really still an alphabet, with vowels overlaid upon consonants and a rule explaining that in terms of phonemes, the vowel follows the overlaid consonant.

So far as I know, written languages take one of three forms:
1. As in ancient Chinese, (or arguably ASL) the written language is wholly independent of the spoken language. Symbols represent ideas instead of specific words, and the grammar is wholly unrelated to the spoken language.
2. As in Cherokee or Japanese, they use a syllabary.
3. They use an alphabet.

Two out of these three systems link the sounds of the spoken language to the written language (though English, in particular, is a bit wild and loose, poorly mapping what is written with what is spoken). We like thinking Klingon is weirdly alien in as many ways as possible, but perhaps human linguists are a bit overtaxed trying to stray from human patterns too much when coming up with written Klingon.

Klingon phonemes for syllables are insufficiently limited for a syllabary to work well. That closing consonant on syllables simply pumps up the potential number of syllables too much to make a syllabary work, unless you compare it to symbolic languages, like Chinese, of course. Cherokee and Japanese lack closing consonants. Both languages have one consonant syllable (the Cherokee "s" and the Japanese "n") and the rest are either bare vowels or single consonants followed by single vowels. (It was refreshing to realize that in Japanese, "Honda" is a three syllable word -- hoe-nnn-dah.)

So, I'm not upset that Klingon uses an alphabet, and I'm glad that in that alphabet, the romanized ligatures are combined to form single characters. That's what the fans came up with on their own and now it is apparently official.

The movies greek the characters for artistic reasons. Given the degree so many other things in the Star Trek universe are intentionally kept as consistent as possible, this choice was unfortunate, and will annoy us forever, but so be it. When you see Klingon writing in a Star Trek movie, just figure it's the Universal Translator Making Big Mistakes.

After all, there's no reason to believe that the technology for Universal Translators would be limited to audio-only, right? The Federation video recorders probably run the Klingon through a translation subroutine written by Microsoft, and we're stuck with the result.

Or maybe Klingon uses multi-color overlays in their text displays so that the REAL text is written in ultra-violet, which they can see and we can't, and they overlay red text, just to confuse spies who might otherwise examine the displays more closely if they were apparently blank, yet Klingons could read them.

Perhaps, given their capacity to see ultra-violet, they can't see red, giving them a particular distaste for Federation personnel wearing red shirts, explaining at least one factor leading to the remarkably short life spans of federation personnel wearing red shirts.

In an imaginary world, things can be explained many ways.

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv
lojmIttI7wI7nuv at gmail.com

On Oct 7, 2011, at 8:02 AM, André Müller wrote:

> Things like that happen(ed) on Earth too. Some languages, like Mongolian, developped a whole new (or rather: entirely modified) alphabet to represent the sounds and syllabic structures of an important foreign language in a better way, in that case: Sanskrit. We remember seeing some pIqaD on TV on Klingon ships but whenever we try to decipher it, we get things like "ghvQ apu HHDj" or something. So in-fiction we might conclude that Klingon either used a different mapping for these 20-something characters of pIqaD and later on changed to the system we know from EuroTalk (I ordered it a few days ago, yay!) and the internet, or that the system was entirely different in the past.
> 
> From the number of different pIqaD characters, though, we can conclude that it couldn't have been a syllabary (too few characters). A script like Korean Hangeul or the Mongolian Soyombo script would work excellently with Klingon, but it seems they've always been using an alphabet, just switched it once (remember those blocky klinzhai characters?) and "now", sometime between the movies and EuroTalk, it apparently changed the phonetic value of the characters. It might be possible, though, to use a 20-odd character alphabet in a completely different way. Considering that the core of a Klingon syllable is always 1 of 5 vowels, there might be ways of representing these syllables in different ways than just a 1:1 CVC(C) syllabic structure... but that's mere speculation.
> 
> The ones more creative than me could possibly think of a scenario, where the Klingon characters we know where given new phonetic values, maybe through a political decree. Maybe the characters were found out by some Klingon linguists to be once borrowed from a foreign species (the Hur'q?) and this caused a scandal among the proud Klingon race, so the phonetic value of the script was then randomized or something like that...
> 
> Personally, I have to admit, I've never been so fond of pIqaD.
> - André
> 
> 
> 
> 2011/10/7 Seruq <seruq at bellsouth.net>
> Perhaps there is more than one pIqaD system, like traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese.
> Perhaps there is a more sophisticated original pIqaD, which works in a Klingon environment; but
> along with learning English in space travel, they also over time developed an alphabet system that
> allows them to handle aliens words.  With DIvI' Hol being "alien", Humans saw this newer simplified
> pIqaD being used, thought it was the "normal, everyday" pIqaD, and started to use that.
> So, it is official, it is not official, and it leaves open a possibility for a full "canon" pIqaD to
> came to light.
> 
> 
> DloraH
> 
> PS:  I can't stand this... I'm forcing this back to plain text.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> 
>        From: Terrence Donnelly [mailto:terrence.donnelly at sbcglobal.net]
>        Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2011 16:51
>        To: tlhingan-hol at stodi.digitalkingdom.org
>        Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] 2 letter language code for Klingon?
> 
> 
>        It's dangerous to speculate about what would be "better" for writing any language, but given
> ta' Hol's penchant for CVC syllables, something similar to Korean hangul would probably be the most
> efficient. But if other dialects of Klingon have different syllable forms, then a simple alphabet
> may have proven most flexible over time.
> 
>        -- ter'eS
> 
>        --- On Thu, 10/6/11, Josh Badgley <joshbadgley at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>                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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