[Tlhingan-hol] Bing Translator URL

[Robyn Stewart]

Fractured orthographies are not the way to promote a language. There are real life languages with almost as many writing systems as speakers, and all it does is reduce communication. I have never had difficulty identifying consonant boundaries in Klingon, and I think changing the way we write to accommodate computers is as silly as those 1970s computer-readable fonts in English. 

On the pIqaD side, I stumbled across a survey result which I can't locate right now (mainly because when I tried to Google for it I got distracted by a really stupid Wikipedia article about "polygutteral") in which a majority of Klingon speakers:
- knew pIqaD
- had learned it relatively recently
- didn't think it was useful because they believed very few people knew it.

If it weren't for the Unicode Catch-22 we'd be using it online by now. I have a student who refuses to use anything else, because otherwise there is crossover from his native language and other languages he knows that use the Latin alphabet. 

- Qov

On 2013-05-18, at 1:55, Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com> wrote:

> On 15 May 2013, at 14:51, Steven Boozer <sboozer at uchicago.edu> wrote:
> 
>> The program correctly translated "Bing Translator" as {bing mughwI'}, though I think I'd prefer to call its "translations" *{Bing Hol} or even better *{Bingan Hol} vs. {tlhIngan Hol})!
> 
> A nice opportunity to point out that Okrand's 1980's "capitalization helps actors" orthography is past its sell-by date. 
> 
> You'd have to write *{bIng Hol}, wouldn't you?
> 
> I remain convinced that there's no reason Klingon orthography shouldn't be able to use capital letters in the normal way. All that needs to be done is to substitute "x" for "Q" (or to use a diacritic like q̂ or q̌) and introduce the use of the hyphen or extend the use of the apostrophe to disambiguate "gh" across morpheme boundaries.
> 
> The most important reason to do this is the fact that q and Q are the same letter in terms of data treatment on computers. A nice reason is that it would permit nice-looking typography.
> 
> But you'll all grumble and tell me that you like Okrand's "weird" orthography even though it's dysfunctional. {{:-) You always do… {{:-)
> 
> Of course, if you all gave the Latin orthography up and started using Piqad (or pIqaD) there'd be a hope of getting that in to Unicode. 
> 
> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
> 
> 
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