tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jun 28 04:07:02 2009
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Re: Klingon orthography (was: Okrand at qep'a')
On 28 Jun 2009, at 06:34, qa'vaj wrote:
>> So! Is there scope for a spelling reform in the Latin orthography
>> for Klingon?
> Given the noticeable advance in Unicode support and
> internationalization over the past few years, I think this is worth
> considering.
Thanks. I note you're not the only one.
> -- Are the options that you displayed selected so that each one can
> be typed with a single standard internationalized keyboard from the
> set that are provided by Linux / Windows / Mac? Or would we need to
> construct a special keyboard for some of them?
The many options are just that... options for discussion. If some of
those characters were selected, sofrwa
> -- How would words be sorted in each? (that is, what would the sort
> order be of words in each option compared to the sort order implied
> by the usual order in which the Klingon alphabet is listed).
How the sorting works depends on the software that is doing the sorting.
> I take it that the presumption in your proposal is that the PUA is
> unworkable, and we'll never get our own ligit code point
> allocation. But some other options occur to me that may be worth
> putting on the table:
I wouldn't use the PUA unless there were no alternative (as with the
pIqaD).
> (Wild and crazy option): How close can we come to something that
> looks like the KLI typeface by selecting glyphs from across the
> unicode map?
*looks around for a disruptor*
> We would have to use a specially-constructed keyboard (not that
> hard, I've done it for both Windows and Linux), and the sort order
> would be pot-luck, and it might come out looking like a movie-
> cliche' ransom note, but I'm curious what the result would look like.
I think (but would have to check) that a lot of the capital letters
used in Standard Klingon Latin orthography are available as small-caps
characters for various phonetic purposes. Offhand I'd wager that Q is
not one of those though!
> (Possibly workable option): We Klingonist might collectively agree
> that we'll do without being able to routinely browse pages in
> Glagolitic or some other ancient script, and overload the code
> points with our own typeface (KLI pIqaD). It would be nice to
> select a code set allocation that web browsers and applications
> would automatically identify. That way we could preserve sort
> order, and the software tools would be none the wiser.
I at least cannot support this. You'd just be offering into the
Internet a lot of data in Klingon that people searching for Slavic
text in Glagolitic would discover. Ick.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/