tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jul 25 00:05:12 2008
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idea for writing system
- From: "Lawrence John Rogers" <[email protected]>
- Subject: idea for writing system
- Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2008 03:03:36 -0400
nuqneH?!?
A while ago I had this idea for the Klingon Writing System. The pdf file
supplied by KLI under Writing Klingon shows a disconnect between the show's
writing system and the language as-known. The pdf article by Dr. Schoen
implies that perhaps Klingon has more than an alphabetic set of characters.
My thing is actually writing systems, esp. the pictographic
logo-syllabo-phonetic. So my idea was taking all the signs occuring in the
canon, all the words in the canon, and combining them to form one of these
"complex writing systems".
(Western) people generally don't appreciate that complex writing systems are
the most commmon writing system type overall in time and space (on earth),
nor that complex writing systems display a far closer "fit" to their
languages than do alphbets, abjads, or even syllabaries (to a lesser
extent). So we have a canonical basis for the complex writing system idea
and we also have the high liklihood that Klingons wouldn't use a writing
system so similar to English.
So I was thinking of making a writing system for Klingon that fits it like a
glove (or a meqleH) instead of a jacket pocket.
Does it have the sort of high consonant-to-vowel ratio that Afro-Asiatic
languages have? I really thinking that if Klingons made up a writing system
for a past version of their current standard language, it would've been most
like onto Egyptian hieroglyphics with its mono-, di-, and tri-consontantal
signs. But then I could botch it, to make it unhuman and just go with di-,
tri-, and tetra-consonant. This might leave English Klingon writers without
even an abjad (voweless alphabet), but it would follow the concept laid down
by Okrand pretty well. That-all would probably be about 600 characters, or
however many could be derived from canon. They'd all have to have "Thompson
Numbers" like Mayan or something.
And then maybe Kligons have "messed-up art" so that their Pictograms,
Logograms and Ideograms have no resemblance to the things depicted, or they
just resemble unrelated things. Some nonsense like that.
Maybe their writing system could combine Chinese(semanto-phonetic blocks),
Egyptian(multi-consonantal signs), and Sumerian(syllabary + logograms)
methods of complex systems into some huge, super-super redundant system,
totally unhuman.
Anybody like the idea or have any scholarly, serious ideas for what where
this writing system should head? Something constructive instead of
insulting or destructive this time would be appropriate, considering I'm on
my way to learning the language and berating all my ideas just gives me (and
everyone else who reads these posts) a bad, bad taste.
naDevvo' yIghoS.
Lawrence loghengs
Canidate for Linguistics B.A. at
Michigan State University