tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jun 24 10:49:35 2009
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Re: Klingon orthography
On 24 Jun 2009, at 17:49, ghunchu'wI' 'utlh wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Michael Everson <[email protected]
> >wrote:
>>> Current case issues are a feature, not a bug.
>>
>> They are a problem for data integrity. There is no question of this.
>
> You keep saying this, and you keep repeating this, but such
> repetition is not convincing.
Nor is your gainsaying.
> The only explanation you give is that the distinction between {q}
> and {Q} can be lost if you apply a case transformation.
Incorrect. I gave other explanations. I also indicate that searching
may not be reliable because of the canonical equivalence of the two
characters. Since they are phonemic, it should be clear that searches
which DO reliable yield different results are better than searches
which do not. If X were used instead of Q, then it would be easy to
search for words containing "qeb" 'squeeze a windbag instrument' and
"Xeb" 'ponytail holder'.
Further, I also indicate that sorting operations are made more complex
if you attempt to treat a casing pair as two separate entities.
Moreover, I outlined the political benefits of taking this data issue
seriously in terms of an eventual re-try at encoding pIqaD.
And I discussed some advantages (evident at least to some here, I have
seen) of being able to enjoy a wider range of typographic options if
Latin casing conventions can be employed
Your suggestion that I have given one explanation only is
disingenuous. I don't think your arguments are going very well, so
you've tried to disparage my attempt at dialogue because I may not
know as much Klingon as you do, even to the point of suggesting that
if I would write 'Atrom my "understanding of Klingon orthography" must
be "faulty" when in fact languages which do case personal names next
to a glottal do so exactly as I indicated.
Come on.
> You dismiss other lossy transformations because they're harder to do
> "accidentally".
I dismiss them because the cause of them is not the inherent and
immutable canonical equivalence of the characters.
> You don't seem to acknowledge that case transformations can be
> similarly lossy in other languages, but the example you presented
> was a
> typical one where capitalization *does* matter: God vs. god.
Yes, and May and may. But these examples in English are very
infrequent (and one expects them to interfile in sorting, for
instance), whilst in the Standard Latin orthography for Klingon, it
pervades the entire system.
> Anecdotally, I've never encountered a case-transforming accident,
> but I have seen several instances of text being mangled beyond
> repair by someone trying to do a global search and replace of a
> misspelled word.
Haven't we all.
> I strongly question the contention that the q/Q pair presents a
> special "data integrity" problem. If your standard of "problem"
> involves Google's search treatment, I think the existence of the
> apostrophe as a consonant is a worse offender.
The apostrophe presents several problems but at LEAST one of them is
not "it is equivalent to another character you want to use in the same
orthography".
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/