tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jul 17 01:33:47 2004

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Re: canon pIqaD

Philip Newton ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 09:10:30 +1000, "QeS lagh" <[email protected]>
wrote:

> On a more serious note, the fact that Klingon syllables are very =
limited in=20
> terms of consonant clusters makes me think that a CV syllabary might be=
 more=20
> likely for Klingon than anything else.

OTOH, Klingon seems to show a strong preference for closed syllables
(i.e. CVC), so either you'll need a lot of viramas to cancel out the
inherent vowel of a CV syllabogram used as the final -C in a syllable,
or a set of simple C grams, or use a CVC syllabary instead.

A CVC syllabary would need many, many different characters, but it's
what Yi does, for example (though I can imagine that the final -p -t -x
shown in the Unicode names are not consonantal codas but tone marks).

> Of course, we might be treated to something completely alien and =
bizarre if=20
> pIqaD ever appears. Like two separate characters mapping to each sound,=
 or=20
> something equally strange.

Have a look at Thai before you dismiss it as strange; there you can have
several characters mapping to the same sound. Or even English: both 'c'
and 'k' are used for the /k/ sound.

In both cases, it's for historical reasons; the alphabet they inherited
was originally used for a language that made more distinctions than the
current language.

This means that for each word, you have to learn by heart how it is
spelled (though the situation in English is probably not as bad since
there aren't that many letters which are pronounced identically).

Philip
HovpoH 2432.19

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