tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Oct 07 09:49:44 1996

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Re: That banner on the screen...

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>Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 08:53:49 -0700
>From: Chet Braun <[email protected]>

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>~mark wrote:
>FWIW, at his panel in Huntsville Marc Okrand said that while he and Okuda
>didn't agree on what pIqaD should be like, one thing they both agreed was
>that it probably wasn't a simple alphabet (like we've been using).  Whether
>it's a pasigraphy or a syllabary or Chinese-style logographs isn't
>determined.
>------------
>For us non-linguists could you briefly explain the differences between pasigraphy, syllabary, and
>logographs?

>Thanks,

OK... I'll even try to work in a little ObKlingon relevance.

First, the simpler stuff.  A syllabary (an example being Cherokee or
Japanese kana (katakana and hiragana)) is a system of symbols in which each
symbol represents a syllable (usually a consonant followed by a vowel, or a
vowel alone, but it could be arranged differently).  If you used the
English letters as elements of a syllabary, each representing its name, you
could spell the word "expediency" as "XPDNC".  Obviously, a syllabary needs
(most of the time, though you could construct cases where it's not so) more
symbols than you'd need if you represented the elements of the syllables
separately (e.g. if you had consonants P,T,K and cowels A,I,U, you'd need
six symbols to represent them individually and nine symbols for all the
possible CV syllables they represent).  This is not necessarily a bad
thing.  I could see Klingons using a syllabary, especially considering how
strongly CVC the phonology tends to be.  Yes, it's not perfectly CVC, but
that's okay.  I could see a CVC-based syllabary, or a CV-based one with
bare consonants added.

I'm not going to go into the details of Chinese orthography, mostly because
I don't understand nearly all of it, and partly because even what I
understand is way complicated.  But in VERY broad strokes, the graphs of
Chinese writing represent words.  Each symbol represents a word (OK, OK,
not true, but close).  Some words need more than one symbol, and many
symbols can be read as more than one word, but basically if you have a
written text, there's only one set of words that you can read it as (modulo
dialectical differences).  You can think of logographs (or ideograms, or
whatever the best term is; most of the time I just call Chinese symbols
"graphs" and leave it at that) as symbols which represent words (as opposed
to sounds).  I could sorta see Klingon doing this, with suffixes getting
their own graphs (basically graphs for each morpheme, which is close to
Chinese), or perhaps *only* affixes (and maybe chuvmey) getting graphs and
open-class words (nouns and verbs) being spelled out with a syllabary or
alphabet (kind of the opposite of *some* parts of the Japanese orthography,
which sometimes uses graphs borrowed from Chinese for word-roots and kana
syllable-symbols for suffixes).  This could be particularly fun, since we
could then have two *different* symbols e.g. for the suffix "-wI'", one for
the noun suffix and one for the verb suffix (tho -mo' probably would have
the same symbol for both, since it has the same meaning.)

Pasigraphy I just threw in because it was mentioned somewhere on another
mailing list and it was in my mind.  A pasigraphy is a way of representing
concepts on paper, but not necessarily tied to words.  Traffic signs could
be seen as a crude pasigraphy.  A red octagon signifies "stop", but not
necessarily in those words.  It could just as easily be read as "halt" or
"`atzor" or "yImev" or "pare" or whatever.  Even without translating to
other languages, there's usually more than one way to assign words to
something written in a pasigraphy.  There exist very complicated ones
(there's a nice example of a letter written in a pasigraphy in Geoffrey
Sampson's book _Writing Systems_; the letter was written by a woman to a
former lover and reads something like "Even though you've moved away with
that Russian woman who came between us, I still miss you and am lonely for
you.  I know things aren't going so well between you and her either..."
(and it goes on about someone local showing affection for the writer, and a
warning that maybe the addressee should do something about it before he and
the Russian woman have any children...)  The point is that although the
letter expresses a very complicated message, it doesn't have to be read
just one way.  I could have started my translation with "That Russian woman
came between us, and ever since I've been lonely" or any number of other
wordings, and what's more the same holds true even in the native language
of the writer.)  It's a representation of ideas, but not words.  It's not
easy to design a *good* pasigraphy, though I've heard Blissymbolics claims
to do something in that regard.  I don't really see Klingons using
pasigraphy.  They seem a little too concerned with accuracy, with
representing what's said as it is, the words someone spoke.  On the flip
side, one could argue that a Klingon would be much more concerned with the
content and not want to bother with the mouth-flapping part.  Still, I
personally don't see pasigraphy as all that likely for Klingons.

>QetaH

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Can we manage to lose this garbage on your posts, somehow?

~mark

(who now adds his own garbage, which however does have some useful purpose
and at least is only a few lines long.)


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