[Tlhingan-hol] nuq bop bom: 'ay' cha'vatlh cha'maH jav: tojbogh to'

[ghunchu'wI' 'utlh]

On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 12:44 PM, Qov <robyn at flyingstart.ca> wrote:
> I've switched over to these kinds of quotation marks: «majQa'» Do they cause
> anyone any problems?

I haven't noticed anything odd when they're used. I did figure out
that they're most likely what broke your email client's presentation
of line breaks when I used them. That's why I have been using simple
<> characters lately instead.

The only major problem with using <> in general is that they get eaten
by some web browsers when the web content management system doesn't
deal with them specially.

> ...I haven't quite worked out the punctuation rules for them yet...
> What do they do in your language and do you think it's compatible
> with Klingon?

They look fine to me with typical American English usage. I also
follow "logical quotes" rules, putting punctuation inside the quote
marks only when it's actually part of the quotation.

> While I'm at it, what's your favourite font for Klingon?  Times New Roman?
> Garamond? Courier New?

For ease of reading, Courier New is what I use. In a web forum, I
typically use a generic serif bold font, which usually ends up being
Times New Roman, to set out Klingon text in an otherwise non-Klingon
post.

For prettiness, I like Footlight MT Light with a few modifications:
lowered capital S; small capitals D, H, I, and Q; an enlarged
apostrophe, and digraph/trigraph ligatures for ch, gh, ng, and tlh
characters.

> And it's time someone programmed a simple Klingon spelling/grammar checker
> for Open Office. It shouldn't be too hard to do.

I wrote a standalone Klingon parser sometime last century. It's not
hard at all. To check spelling is a less tractable problem, as there
are so many word pairs that differ by just one letter. The only way I
can see to make it useful is to present to the user a simplistic
translation of each word.

On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Qov <robyn at flyingstart.ca> wrote:
> Ironically they don't show correctly in my own mail program. Maybe it's time
> to upgrade. Recommendations?  I'm running a reasonably recent flavour of
> whatever Microsoft is calling it these days. I want a fast loading mail
> program with good filing and filtering that allows me to exclude images from
> my incoming mail by default, and has good language support.

Mozilla Thunderbird? It's recently been placed on the "no further
development" list by the Firefox people, but a lot of people think
that it's nearly perfect as it is, and definitely good enough to make
that not a problem.

I myself use a personal domain and Google's email system, writing the
bulk of my email using the web client but using my iPod Touch as an
offline email client and reading almost everything there.

-- ghunchu'wI'