tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jul 26 09:42:57 2008
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Re: idea for writing system
> The issue I'm referring to isn't whether it's a perfect match, but
> whether it's phonetic or phonemic. Korean is phonemic; languages such
> as English and French are phonetic. The character corresponding most
Depends on how you're using the word "phonetic". A phonemic
transcription would mark the "t" of "cat" and the "t" of "top" as the
same sound; a phonetic transcription would not.
(It's only because you used "phonetic" in contrast to "phonemic" that
this quite technical meaning even entered my mind as a possibility.
Otherwise I would have assumed a less technical meaning of the word.)
> closely to "k," for example, stands for the sounds "k" and "g"
> depending on the context because voicing is phonemic in Korean. It is
Do you mean that voicing is NOT phonemic? That "k" and "g" are
allophones of the same sound? Because if there was a phonemic difference
between the sounds, having the same symbol represent them would be less
than optimal.
The Okrandian writing system is pretty much phonemic - as long as we
consider the digraphs (and trigraph) as single "letters". It's actually
not hard to programmatically parse written Klingon. Lower-case "h"
appears only in digraphs or trigraphs, so it's easy to find "ch", "gh",
and "tlh", and g never appears by itself, so it's easy to find "ng".
> this feature plus the fact that the characters mimic the shape of the
> mouth that makes King Sejong's work so incredible. AFAIK, there is NO
> dialect of Korean that doesn't have this representation regardless of
> local variation. BB
While I do not speak Korean myself, I have been impressed with its
alphabet. Although in some cases it is only in the most abstract sense
that one can say the characters mimic the shape of the mouth.
Personally, I don't see the purpose in creating a writing system for
Klingon. Inside the fiction, we know there is one - we just don't know
the details. Outside the fiction, we know Okrand created it using the
Latin alphabet.
But it certainly isn't going to hurt anything for someone to create one
for his own amusement. But he should realize that it is unlikely that
converts will flock to the idea.