tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jun 04 01:24:37 1996
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Re:KLI font
quote:
.....
charghwI': "Careful. Just because Okrand uses punctuation in the
Romanized
writings does not mean that Klingons necessarily use it in pIqaD..."
I suspect that the Klingons don't use punctuation. Assuming that the
Klingon
language is something like Ancient Chinese, the reader must make
assumptions
about where sentences begin and end. Klingon word-structure and
sentence-structure may actually make punctuation less necessary than
it is in,say, English.
(Egyptian had no punctuation either.)
--bangteH
aka Captain Jean-Luc pIqaD
.......
Greetings!
I used to be interested in archeology and all that jazz...
Many Roman inscriptions in stone simply run words and sentences
together to a string of letters. However, I also remember examples
of punctuation by spacing.
Punctuation increases the efficiency and speed of reading. The
kind of Egyptian inscriptions we find in temples etc were not
meant to be read quickly. (Regular Egyptian writing for documents
looked quite different.) They had a ritual or magic function,
invoking
whatever powers there might be, much like the very intricate and
illegible Koran verses you find in mosques (written in Arabic).
It doesn't matter how long you need to puzzle it out. Anybody here
canreadthissentencewithoutpunctuationfairlywellbutitputsastraino
nyouandslowsdownthetransferofinformation. :-)
Structuring the written information takes part of the workload off
your mind (or your pattern recognition, to be exact) and frees up
resources for higher functions (=understanding what you're reading).
And BTW, it *is* Klingon to be efficient :-)
I believe we do need some sort of punctuation in writing Klingon,
regardless of what font we use, pIqaD or Latin. Most Klingonists
(meaning me, too) would be totally lost without the normal
spacing and one-sentence-per-line convention of writing tlhIngan Hol
used on this list. tlhIngan Hol is somewhat ambiguous: the same
word can be a verb or an adjective,sometimes even a pronoun
or a verb or a noun (e.g. jIH: I/me, I am, viewing screen.
KD page 90). Grammar, usage of pre/suffixes and sentence structure
should take care of this but if you run sentences together you
have a harder time finding the structure writing in Clipped
Klingon increases the problem the ambiguity becomes even
greater. :-)
So let's not make life too difficult for us. However, it *would*
look nice and not decrease legibility if you could run the
pIqaD letters within a word together to one shape, the way it
is done in script, and on Klingon gauntlets in TNG, too.
That was my .02 tlhIngan money unit's worth.
taj'IH