tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jun 14 12:22:13 1996
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Re: Rampant Punctuation
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>Date: Thu, 13 Jun 1996 06:48:56 -0700
>From: "David W. Schaefer" <[email protected]>
>>>Should English punctuation be used in tlhIngan Hol?
>SuStel replies:
>> The quick answer: Okrand uses punctuation in his sentences in "The Klingon
>Way" (and other sources, I'm told).
>I understand the Okrand = canon ideal and all (and my copy of TKW still sits
>unfortunately unpurchased on the shelf of Starbase Columbus), but I'd challenge
>him on his punctuation usage. As Teresa Wells states in her masters thesis on
>tlhIngan Hol (and I paraphrase), Okrand goal was to create a decidedly alien
>language. The whole structure of tlhIngan Hol reflects this. Except for the
>English punctuation. If you'll notice, adding English punctuation is a
>relatively recent phenomenon -- you'll not find a single mark of punctuation on
>anything tlhIngan Hol in TKD.
>Dave S.
A simpler answer, and likely closer to the "truth" insofar as that means
anything with a language with a fictional history:
We write in Romanized Klingon, using a transcription system. We don't know
much about pIqaD, we don't know which order it was written, how spaces are
used, anything. It does seem unlikely there's a whole set of punctuation
characters we've never seen (though we generally only see Klingon written
in signs or tactical displays, places where punctuation is rare in English
as well). But so what? That's not what we're writing. When you write
Sanskrit transliterated into English, you put spaces between the words
(except where the word-boundary has been obscured by vowel coalescence),
even when spaces aren't written in the original. The same can be said for
quite a few languages which don't ordinarily put spaces between their
words: we space them out in English transliteration, for the convenience of
non-native speakers. Old Hebrew prayers had no punctuation in the
original, but most modern prayer-books use Western punctuation (periods,
commas) to indicate the phrases (OK, Biblical Hebrew was punctuated quite a
few centuries ago, but that was with a special system of musical/phrasal
symbols... which most prayer-books don't put and use commas and periods
instead (or sometimes in addition)). Hell, the earliest Hebrew, the
earliest versions of the Bible, had no *vowels* written, but they're
written in now, as a convenience to modern readers. We're not Klingons,
we're humans studying Klingon. We use a transcription system based on
letters we're familiar with (at least that Okrand was familiar with) for
our own convenience. We put spaces between words, etc. (who knows how
Klingon does? Just because there are spaces on the screen doesn't mean
they're used the same as we use them. Sanskrit sometimes has spaces
between words, but not between all pairs) The whole transcription system
is for our own convenience. So where's the crime in using punctuation
marks for our own convenience? If you're asking if we should use
punctuation when writing pIqaD, I can confidently answer, "I don't know,"
because we don't know enough about pIqaD. But I do most of my writing in
the Romanized orthography, which is just a scholarly convention to make it
easier for us (or Okrand anyway) to read the stuff. So yes, I DO think
it's appropriate to use punctuation in Klingon text written in Okrand
Romanization.
~mark
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