tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jul 25 19:44:28 2008
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Re: idea for writing system
Written from the center out? That's interesting. Like some sort of
Phaistos Disk or something.
That pdf article by Dr. Schoen seems to indicate that there are more than 15
glyphs bandied about freely by Okuda.
I'd have to assign some meaning to what glyphs I found. It may take a while
on my part, not only due to learning the language sufficiently but also
buying or renting whatever materials contain said glyphs.
Another problem that occured to me with the last post is that Chinese,
right, (along with the myriad Cuneiforms while they were in non-scholastic
use) is only abstract BECAUSE of its thousands of years of use. And so,
underlying a logo- or syllabo- phonetic Klingon writing system would most
likely be some "Old Klingon". However, given the general direction of the
conlangers of this language community, I'd have to just fudge that element
of reality and base it on Klingon. (Or I could just go over to Vulcan,
which has ancestral languages worked out. Just kidding!) Besides, it really
wouldn't be much fun if you had to learn another language in order to
understand the archaic orthography of Modern Klingon. (Though this is
precisely why I wish to persue graduate studies in Oracle Bone Script.)
It'd be a beast of a project. BUT, I am young.
David Trimboli writes:
> 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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