tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri May 01 08:36:32 1998

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Re: Some questions and ideas

According to TPO:
... 
> Since the glyphs are already not canon, why don't we have someone (whoever
> created the glyphs) create (non-canon) names for this (non-canon) writing
> system?

The person who created the glyphs is Michael Okuda who designs the
sets for the whole Star Trek series. He will never name the
glyphs. Please understand that it is not that he merely is not
interested in using these glyphs to actually write anything. He
is downright hostile towards the entire concept. In his
opinion, he OWNS the glyphs and he will do whatever he wants
with them and nobody else can do anything with them.

Mark Okrand goes along with this, recognizing the political
realities involved and states that while we don't know anything
about the Klingon writing system, it probably is not an
alphabet as we think of it (even though that is exactly what
Okuda's greeked writing looks to be). 

The only "official" pIqaD alphabet that Okuda signed off on is
the one Paramount sold to Bitstream. It has ten characters in
it corresponding to the first ten characters of the English
alphabet. It also has a collection of Star Trek badges on it.
DojHa'.

Okrand's romanized alphabet is supposed to be Okrand's own
writing system to describe Klingon SPOKEN language. It is not
supposed to have anything to do with any Klingon writing
system. The romanized writing system has punctuation. We don't
know about pIqaD. 

We don't know the names of the glyphs. We could probably make
something up, but at least two different systems have already
been suggested and neither of them caught anybody's attention.
One involved using common words beginning with the character as
we have unofficially assigned them. The other (mine) made up
new monosyllabic words for the glyphs, starting with the
romanized letter associated with the glyph as we have
arbitrarily assigned them.

Meanwhile, nobody carries the authority to do this and it is
not generally considered to be a need with enough broad appeal
for anyone to agree on what system to use.

And in case you think maybe the person who arbitrarily assigned
glyphs to letters could name the glyphs, the original person
who did that is now unknown and the person who did the most
popular font with this assignment happens to be the head of the
KLI and is not interested in doing anything so likely to
attract the attention of Paramount's lawyers as to name
characters we weren't really supposed to be using in the first
place.

So, this is a dead issue. Get used to it. We don't need another
dozen messages saying, "Yeah, but why doesn't somebody name the
glyphs?" It won't happen. Deal.

> DloraH

charghwI'

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