tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jun 30 13:13:09 1993

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>From: Will Martin <[email protected]>
>Date:    Wed, 30 Jun 93 12:32:57 EDT
>X-Mailer: UVa PCMail 1.7.1
>Content-Length: 1828

>On Jun 29,  8:00pm, (Mark E. Shoulson) wrote:
>> Subject: fonts
>> I mapped all
>> single-character (in Okrand transcription) phonemes to their ASCII
>> equivalents (i.e. a,b,D,e,H,I,j,l,m,n,o,p,q,Q,r,S,t,u,v,w,y,' will all be
>> on those characters), and mapped ch-->C, ng-->N, gh-->G, and tlh-->T.  I
>> tried to make the ligature table handle changing those, so you wouldn't
>> have to type the non-standard method, but it's too much for the thing to
>> handle (the triple-character tlh, disambiguating n-gh and ng-h (I know h
>> isn't a tlhIngan Hol glyph, but TeX doesn't), and making kerns work for g
>> as well as G, since it doesn't know a G is coming when it sees the g...).
>> I take it folks want it?
>> 
>> ~mark

>If it has not yet been cast in stone, I'd vote for a mapping more like
>Dr. Schoen's simply because you don't have to use the shift key when dealing
>with various letters of the alphabet. The major differences are that there is
>only one "a" and only one "D", so why require the shift key to type the "D"?

Because Marc Okrand did.

Remember, there is precisely one universally accepted orthography for
tlhIngan Hol (or close to universally), and that is the Okrand
romanization.  That's it.  That's what we're used to reading and writing.
Okrand chose to make S and D and I uppercase.  Was this wise?  Maybe, maybe
not.  Is it a good idea to change it?  Almost certainly not.  New people
joining our ranks will be madly flipping through their TKDs to find
"nuknekh" and wondering why they can't find it.  A fine language it is that
new people can't successfully join.  I'm not going to open that can of
worms any further, but suffice it to say that I oppose reforming the Okrand
orthography excepting that Okrand does the reforming, and maybe not even
then.

That said, I mapped the characters in my METAFONT version to minimize the
contortions a Klingonist has to go through in order actually to *use* the
thing.  Klingonists all learned from TKD, so their experiences are
consisten with the Okrand method.  Thus, they expect (or should expect) to
see "nuqneH, HoD.  qaStaH nuq?" and not "nukneq hod, qastaq nuk?" or
anything else.  Ideally, I'd like the TeX input to be straight, plain
Okrand romanized tlhIngan-Hol, and the rest handled behind he scenes, but
the ligature table isn't powerful enough.  So I made it as close as
possible to that ideal, conceding to uppercase letters for multi-character
phonemes because I had to.  Simple search/replace methods can turn
Okrand-style input into input suitable for the font, and fewer than most
other "reforms", and the result is still vaguely readable, for checking.  I
think this is a better plan.  You can always redefine TeX macros if you
prefer. (\def\tlh{T}, etc...)

~mark

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