tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jul 25 12:52:12 2008

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Re: idea for writing system

David Trimboli ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol po'wI']

Fiat Knox wrote:
> --- Lawrence John Rogers <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> 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".
> 
> - The Klingon language's basic subject/verb/direct object sentence
> structure is the reverse of English, i.e.:-
> 
> OBJECT - VERB - SUBJECT
> 
> So perhaps reversing the direction of writing might help. One could
> make it complex by retaining the right-to-left order of the words,
> but writing each word left-to-right.

I seem to remember Mike Okuda saying something about Klingon being
written from the center, out.

> - Nouns are modified by a series of suffixes, of which there are five
> types:-
> 
> NOUN - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
> 
> So one could make one symbol suffice for one suffix.

If one is sticking to the symbols actually seen on television and the
movies (what are there, 15 of them?), you don't have anywhere near
enough symbols to cover everything logographically.

Since there are so few "official" glyphs, you'd probably have to
consider *sequences* of glyphs instead of individual glyphs.

I've never found a satisfactory way to get what's shown on screen come
anywhere close to a working writing system for Klingon.

-- 
SuStel
Stardate 8566.2

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