tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jan 23 14:48:49 1995
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Re: klingonische Woerter
>Date: Sat, 21 Jan 1995 14:35:03 -0500
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: "William H. Martin" <[email protected]>
>According to Jeremy Cowan:
>> Due to the simple pattern of the sentences and the canon
>> examples, I theorize that Klingon writing does not use spaces or
>> punctuation. It usually makes it only slightly more difficult for
>> English speakers to read.
>Spaces? I'm not sure I could do without spaces very well. The
>canon pIQaD, illegible as it is, clearly uses spaces.
Hee... Maybe so, but I don't trust that "canon" as far as I can spit it.
And Jeremy's right: not every language puts spaces between its words! I
know when I learned Sanskrit it didn't take too long to get used to the
fact that you only have a space (and break the line that is continuous over
most of the letters in the alphabet) when a syllable-break happens to
coincide with a word-break (or at verse-ends). It started looking strange
to see words all separated out, for that matter.
As I once mentioned a while ago, when we were arguing over how to write
pIqaD, we really are inventing this... After all, perhaps pIqaD is read
left-right. Perhaps right-left. Perhaps top-down. Perhaps bottom-up.
Okuda says he designs Klingon screens from the middle out. Maybe Klingon
is written in two columns, and the left column goes RL and the right column
goes LR. Or in two columns at the top of the page and two columns at the
bottom, as above, but the upper columns are read lowest-line first. No
stranger than boustrophedon writing that's been used in Terran languages!
We here tend to stick with what's familiar, so we're putting spaces and
reading left to right horizontally. So long as we realize we're making
this up ourselves...
>> janSIy }}:+D>
>>
>charghwI'
>--
~mark