[Tlhingan-hol] Vocabulary Sources & Sort Order

[Terrence Donnelly]

The first time I did this, I ran a program (no spreadsheets, yet) on a DEC VAX computer. It tokenized each romanized di- and trigraph along the lines that ghunchu'wI' describes, but then did a global substitution on every character in the line to assign them characters with the proper ASCII value to sort correctly. For example, 'q' and 'Q', were tokenized as 'k' and 'q', and were then replaced in the line to sort by two characters whose sort values were one apart, such as '!' and '@'.  The converted string was then sorted, converted back to the tokenized forms, and then the tokens expanded and/or substituted with their actual romanized values.

It seems bizarrely complex, but DEC had their own version of BASIC, and it contained a CONVERT function to do all those codings and decodings in a single line of code (I guess for some purpose very similar to this), so the whole program was only a few lines of code.

-- ter'eS

--- On Mon, 2/6/12, ghunchu'wI' 'utlh <qunchuy at alcaco.net> wrote:

> From: ghunchu'wI' 'utlh <qunchuy at alcaco.net>
> Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Vocabulary Sources & Sort Order
> To: "Klingon language email discussion forum" <tlhingan-hol at kli.org>
> Date: Monday, February 6, 2012, 3:13 PM
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 11:56 AM, Qov
> <robyn at flyingstart.ca>
> wrote:
> > I suppose the safe option is to sub every single letter
> so that the 26
> > Klingon ones become the 26 latin ones, in an order that
> subs the two and
> > three letter combos (I don't care what we call them)
> first and then the undo
> > needs to be in a calculated order, too. Someone must
> have this down to a
> > science.
> 
> I map these thirteen single letters to uppercase:
>   a b e j l m o p r u v w y -> A B E J L M O P R U V
> W Y
> 
> These four already-uppercase letters remain unchanged:
>   D H I S -> D H I S
> 
> I map the apostrope to uppercase Z.
>   ' -> Z
> 
> I map two digraphs to single characters:
>   ch -> C, gh -> G
> 
> The remaining six letters get mapped with numeric suffixes
> to make the
> sort order come out right:
>   n -> N1, ng -> N2, q -> Q1, Q -> Q2, t
> -> T1, tlh -> T2
> 
> DAH T2AZCUQ1DIZ HOC, T2AZCUZ.
> 
> This scheme was independently devised by at least one other
> person.
> 
> -- GUN1CUZWIZ
> 
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