tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Apr 29 02:18:34 1998

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Some questions and ideas

    Let me introduce myself.  I'm Shaun Ault, a first-year at Oberlin
College.  I've been studying thlIngan Hol for about a year now, and for
this last semester, with the help of a friend of mine, been teaching a
small course on the basics of thlIngan Hol.  I have a few questions
about some minor details of the language, and also some suggestions.
    First of all, concerning the pIqaD:  Do the letters have names?  For
instance, a, bee, cee, etc. in English.  Is there a direct analog, such
as 'a', be', che', etc, or some other such system?  What I would really
like to see is a system like that of the Greek letters.  That is, a lot
of the letters would have two- or three-syllable names (alpha, beta,
etc.).
    Next, I need to clarify something.  Do Klingons use any form of
punctuation?  Since I know of no system other than that of English, I've
gone under the assumption that Klingon doesn't use any puntuation.  But
what I think would be really cool is if Klingon had its own system of
puntuation, with different symbols and different rules of usage.
    And I was looking around in all of various lexicons, but couldn't
find a good way to say 'literature' (as in, of course, 'Klingon
literature').  If any of you know a good way to translate that, I'd be a
happier person.
    Lastly, I'd like to suggest something concerning Klingon music.  I
am a double-major:  math and music composition (which is rather scary),
and I was really interested by the fact that Klingon is said to have a
nonatonic music scale.  So I was messing around with some things and hit
upon something.  Klingons are probably going to be as direct and
to-the-point about music as they are about anything else.  So there's no
way they'd even mess with an 'equal-tempered' scale at all.  Klingons
probably would only work with music that can be found raw in nature.
Thinking along these lines, I messed around with the overtone series
(the set of pitches that occur naturally as a result of the fact that a
string (or column of air) can vibrate at a number of different
frequencies.  Guitar harmonics and all the brass instruments rely on
overtones.)
    So I looked at the first 16 pitches of the overtone series of G:
    G  G D  G B- D F-  G A+ B- C#+ D Eb+ F- F#-  G   (+ = sharper than
normal, - = flatter than normal)
    And, lo and behold, the last 9 pitches begin and end in G.  This
looked like a really subtle and elegant way to construct a nonatonic
scale in the most natural way possible.
    So if we take these last nine pitches, and do the math behind it to
figure out frequencies, we come up with:
    yu     G     98
    bIm    A+    110.25
    'egh   B-    122.5
    loS    C#-   134.73
    vagh   D     147
    jav    Eb+   159.24
    Soch   F-    171.5
    chorgh F#-   183.75
    yu     G     196

    For those music people out there, you will notice that even though
there are a lot of 'weird' sounding notes, the interval of the fifth is
still intact (since it is a very natural sounding interval).  The other
intervals are not familiar to most people, and sound either strange or
slightly out of tune.  But many primitive civilizations still use scales
very similar to this.

    Well, I apologize for the extremely long post.

    Satlho'bej
    Qapla'

    'atlh

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